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April 2025

IMMIGRATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Leavitt Holds Powerful White House Press Briefing, Leaves the Media Stunned Sarah Anderson

By on April 17th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2025/04/16/leavitt-holds-powerful-white-house-press-briefing-leaves-the-media-stunned-n4938974

There are some things that just leave you speechless, and what happened in the White House Press Room today is one of them. And it didn’t just leave me speechless — it left the reporter pool stunned, too. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that she’d be holding an impromptu press briefing with a special guest on Wednesday afternoon, and if you missed it, it was a doozy.

The topic was Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Well, sort of. Leavitt started by pointing out that Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen was currently in El Salvador, pleading with the country’s government to release one of its own citizens — a member of the foreign terrorist organization MS-13 with a history of violence who was in the United States illegally — so he can smuggle him back into the United States so we can probably deport him again. 

Leavitt began, “Today, we have officially learned Democrat officials still refuse to accept the will of the American people” before, once again, reminding us who the left has spent the last couple of weeks defending so vehemently.  

Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen rushed to Dulles Airport this morning to fly to El Salvador, potentially using taxpayer dollars, to demand the release of a deported illegal alien MS-13 terrorist. The Democrats and the media in this room have continually and wrongly labeled Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a ‘Maryland Father.’

There is no ‘Maryland Father.’ Let me reiterate: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member, and foreign terrorist who was deported back to his home country. And when Kilmar Abrego Garcia was originally arrested, he was wearing a sweatshirt with rolls of money covering the ears, mouth, and eyes of presidents on various currency denominations. This is a known MS-13 gang symbol of “Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.” Abrego Garcia was also arrested with two other well-known members of the vicious MS-13 gang, and two separate judges found that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, and that finding has never been disputed.

And just this morning, it was revealed through Maryland court documents that Abrego Garcia’s wife petitioned for an order of protection against him for two instances of domestic violence in May of 2021. And here is the order right here. The court ordered that “The respondent committed the following acts of abuse.” Once in May of 2021, “Assault in any degree,” and on May 4th of 2021, he punched and scratched his wife, ripped off her shirt, and grabbed and bruised her.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How do the lawyers defending Hamas sleep at night? A British law firm is regurgitating the terrorists’ vile propaganda. Luke Gittos

By on April 17th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/17/how-do-the-lawyers-defending-hamas-sleep-at-night/

I didn’t know what to expect when I decided to read the now-infamous application to ‘de-proscribe’ Hamas. This is the application lodged by a British law firm last week to remove Hamas from the UK government’s list of banned organisations under the Terrorism Act. The lawyers have asked home secretary Yvette Cooper to make it legal to openly support Hamas in the UK, given that the act makes expressing support for any proscribed organisation a criminal offence.

I was driven to read the application in full after seeing a bizarre interview on Talk earlier this week with one of the lawyers involved, barrister Franck Magennis. He seemed affronted when the presenter asked him how he sleeps at night. A perfectly reasonable question, given that Magennis acknowledged it was his decision to represent Hamas, an organisation responsible for the largest pogrom of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas is not a client he was professionally obliged to take on.

In response, Magennis accused the presenter of putting ‘a target on [his] back’ by falsely conflating him and his client. He even suggested that the presenter ‘may receive a call from the police’. (It is worth noting that, on 7 October 2023, Magennis changed his profile picture on X to a bulldozer crashing through a border fence and tweeted ‘Victory to the intifada’, although this has since been deleted.)

As a criminal lawyer who defends just about anybody, I know a bit of what this barrister is talking about. I am not a murderer because I defend murderers. Everyone should be entitled to legal representation. If the Nazi leadership could rely on Britain’s top legal brains during the Nuremberg trials, then there is no reason, in principle, why Hamas should not avail themselves of the best and brightest, either. So I decided to take the application seriously, and read it in good faith.

It turns out the ‘application’ spouts Hamas propaganda from the very first line. It reads: ‘For more than a century, the British state has been responsible for colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine.’ This is hardly the impartial, objective language of the courtroom. It takes Hamas’s warped view of history and repeats it unquestioningly. It refers to Israel, quoting a former British governor of Palestine, as a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’. It casts Israel as illegitimate, claiming that requiring Hamas to accept Israel’s right to exist would be an ‘unreasonable demand’. In other words, Hamas should be entitled to continue to fight for the eradication of the only democracy in the Middle East and the world’s only Jewish State. It refers to Israel in quotation marks, to ‘signal that it is a colonial term, reflective of a racist attempt to impose an ethno-exclusionary state on a pluralistic and ethnically diverse population’. These are the kinds of things you’d expect to hear from a batshit student in a sixth-form common room, rather than a lawyer in a courtroom.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Mississippi Musk’ Finds $400 Million in State Government Waste While one in five Mississippians lives below the poverty line. by Robert Spencer

By on April 17th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mississippi-musk-finds-400-million-in-state-government-waste/

“When the sun goes down, the tide goes out, the people gather ’round and they all begin to shout, ‘Hey, hey, in the dusk, it’s a lift to beat the left with ol’ Mississippi Musk!’” Okay, okay, so it’s not as catchy as the actual song, but one thing that is catching is the Trumpian quest to cut the fat from government spending and make more efficient, and saner, use of the taxpayers’ money. In Mississippi, state auditor Shad White, also known as “Mississippi Musk,” has been hard at work against state government bloat, and what he has found is enlightening.

Ol’ Shad, as I imagine the folks down there in Clarkdale an’ Natchez call him, has found that Mississippi has wasted a staggering amount of money, and he would be the first one to tell you that it is extremely unlikely that Elvis’ home state is alone in this. Fox News reported Monday that White is releasing “a compilation of audits conducted by his office that tabulated a collective $400 million in waste over the course of his tenure.”

That compilation is as sure to be as big a hit as “Heartbreak Hotel,” at least among patriots who are tired of seeing the fruits of their labors devoured among the corrupt, incompetent, and undeserving. (By the way, that wasn’t just an Oxford comma there, folks; that was an Oxford, Mississippi comma.)

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Tulsi Gabbard DIGs the Deep State Partisan intel agencies are the most immediate threat to representative government. by Lloyd Billingsley

By on April 17th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/tulsi-gabbard-digs-the-deep-state/

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has established the Director’s Initiative’s Group (DIG), a task force to investigate weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency. Gabbard’s best ally for that task passed away in 2021 but left behind strategic guidance for the nation moving forward.

The Italian-born Angelo Codevilla, a Rutgers and Notre Dame alum, served in the US Navy as an intelligence officer both at sea and in the Fleet Intelligence Center, with continued service in the Naval Reserve. Codevilla also served as intelligence analyst at the Bureau for Intelligence and Research in the U.S. Foreign Service, and joined the staff of Sen. Malcolm Wallop on the Senate Intelligence Committee. In 1992 Codevilla authored Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century. Two decades into that new century, the author showed his grasp of the problem America now faces:

America’s Intelligence agencies are the deep state’s deepest part, and the most immediate threat to representative government. They are also not very good at what they are supposed to be doing. Protecting the Republic from them requires refocusing them on their proper jobs.

Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield. (emphases added)

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trying To Figure Out How Much Of The Government Grants Goes To Left-Wing Causes And Propaganda Francis Menton

By on April 17th, 2025

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-4-15-trying-to-figure-out-how-much-of-the-government-grants-goes-to-left-wing-causes-and-propaganda

Back on February 14, I had a post titled “How Much Of This Has Been Paid For By The U.S. Taxpayer?” The post asked that question about a sample of issues held dear by the Left: migrant caravans, services in the U.S. to illegal aliens, DEI and climate alarm.

Over the intervening weeks it has become clear that the general answer is “a lot of it,” but the details will be slow to emerge. For example, you can go to the website of DOGE and get an endless list of hundreds of contracts and grants that have been reduced or canceled. But they all seem to have legitimate headlines or titles, even if they were wasteful. How much of this money was getting diverted to an NGO, and from there to another NGO and then another until it ended up funding migrant caravans or pro-Palestinian propaganda or some other such cause. There is very little indication.

Certainly, you can count on the biggest left-wing grant recipients to be less than honest in defending their fiefdoms. Consider, for example, Harvard University. It’s been big news the past couple of days that Harvard has refused to knuckle under to President Trump’s demands that it rein in anti-semitism, in order to retain its many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of annual federal funding. Harvard President Alan Garber defended the university’s position in an email addressed to the “Harvard Community” that is publicly available here. Here’s how it starts out:

For three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields. These innovations have made countless people in our country and throughout the world healthier and safer. . . . These partnerships are among the most productive and beneficial in American history. New frontiers beckon us with the prospect of life-changing advances—from treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility. For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.

It all looks like mis-direction to me. How much of Harvard’s federal funding goes to the widely-supported subjects that Garber lists — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, AI, quantum science and engineering? Clearly a small minority.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

This Week Today Current Events from Israel Rabbi Ben Packer

By on April 17th, 2025

https://mailchi.mp/dd9d88d97a17/israel-current-events

EXCERPTS

Gaza/Hostage Situation Update
While we were burning our chometz last week, the IDF was busy scorching parts of Gaza, both above and below ground. Most of the ground activity is happening in the southern strip in the area now referred to as the Morag Corridor and also in the northern strip. Both sides seem to be avoiding confrontation for the most part. In instances where terrorists did appear, Israeli Air Force planes eliminated them before they could pose a significant threat to the nearby IDF soldiers. Meanwhile, the planes also spent their time eliminating terrorist leaders in the central areas of Gaza that the ground troops are currently avoiding. 

Negotiations are continuing toward renewing a ceasefire that would see about 10 Israeli hostages freed in exchange for the release of hundreds of terrorists and the resumption of aid. As of now, Hamas is still insisting on guarantees that the war will be ended before any more hostages are freed. The Israeli Government continues to insist that increased military pressure is what has led to previous hostage deals and is the only thing that will lead to future ones as well. Former hostages and family members of current hostages continue to compete to see who can say the most retarded, non-sensible thing about how the remaining hostages should be freed. It’s getting quite annoying. For some reason folks seem to think that these people are beyond criticism, but their incredible lack of sensitivity to the families of the hundreds of soldiers killed and to those wounded and still fighting certainly qualify them for a nice helping of vitriol. Everyone wants the hostages freed, but performing national suicide shouldn’t really be on the negotiating table. 

A new trend started this week where folks who think they are important are signing petitions that say that the war should be ended in order for all the hostages to be freed – basically what Hamas has demanded from the very beginning of the current conflict. They threaten that they will no longer appear for reserve duty and/or work. So far, the Chief of Staff has removed some of them from reserve duty altogether. This is definitely the correct way going forward. US President Ronald Reagan and the air traffic controllers all over again. Some British people also joined in as well. Lol. That imperial ship sank a long time ago. There is nothing like British self-righteous arrogance. So much better done than their food.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Tierney New York City’s Composting Delusion It is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling—delivering little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost.

By on April 17th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-composting-recycling

After forcing New Yorkers to spend billions of dollars for the privilege of sorting their garbage into recycling bins, municipal officials have found an even costlier—and grubbier—way for residents to spend their time in the kitchen. They must now separate food waste into compost bins or face new fines imposed by the city’s garbage police, who will be digging through trash looking for verboten coffee grounds and onion peels.

Composting is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling: it delivers little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost. In addition to wasting people’s time, it attracts rats to compost facilities, puts more fuel-burning trucks on the road, and diverts tax dollars from what was once a core priority of the Department of Sanitation—keeping the streets clean. Whatever its appeal to suburbanites with yards and gardens, composting is absurdly impractical in a city—especially one facing a massive budget deficit.

Where are New York apartment dwellers supposed to find space in their tiny kitchens for yet another waste bin? It’s bad enough that elderly residents must schlep their newspapers and bottles to basement recycling bins instead of simply using the trash chute—now they’re expected to haul bags of rotting food, too. (New Yorkers have long been denied another convenient option, garbage disposals, because the city’s onerous plumbing regulations have prevented most buildings from installing them in kitchen sinks.) Under the new rules, landlords are on the hook: fines of up to $300 will be imposed if their buildings don’t comply with composting requirements. But how are they and the superintendents of large buildings supposed to enforce the law? Unlike the city’s inspectors, they never signed up to be trash detectives, much less dumpster divers.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Daniel Shuchman Richard Bernstein Warned Us About DEI The late New York Times journalist was troubled by university leaders’ weak commitment to free expression and intellectual diversity.

By on April 17th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/richard-bernstein-dei-universities-dictatorship-of-virtue

Decades before terms like “virtue signaling,” “anti-racism,” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” became ubiquitous, one author foresaw how they would come to dominate American universities and other elite institutions. Richard Bernstein, an esteemed New York Times journalist whose career spanned assignments from Europe to China, died last month at 80.

Among his books was Dictatorship of Virtue: How Multiculturalism is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, Our Lives (1994, updated 1995). In it, Bernstein identified these concepts in their early stages. He acknowledged the appeal of these ideas, which could sound like aspirations for “a fuller realization of American pluralism.” But over time, he argued, they evolved into an intolerant political program which makes people afraid to say what they truly think. Bernstein predicted that this political movement, which he called the “new consciousness,” would reshape American culture, deepen polarization, and ultimately spark a fierce backlash—one with its own potential perils.

As Bernstein’s reporting makes clear, feckless leadership and rigid quasi-religious ideologies are nothing new at American universities. While his focus in Dictatorship of Virtue is the University of Pennsylvania, Bernstein insists that Penn was “fairly typical” of other elite universities, where “diversity training [had become] an exercise in the advancement of radical political ideology.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Will Harvard Go Full Hillsdale? Harvard risks $2.2B in federal funds as it defies anti-discrimination mandates, drawing comparisons to Hillsdale’s stand-alone model of rejecting government strings. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 17th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/17/will-harvard-go-full-hillsdale/

Harvard University has rejected various demands of a presidential commission on anti-Semitism.

The task force wants to persuade Harvard to ensure Jewish students on its campus are no longer harassed, or else lose its federal funding.

Harvard retorts that it won’t be bullied by Washington.

Among its other requirements, the Trump administration also warned Harvard to cease using race as a criterion in its admissions, hiring, and promotion, contrary to law.

And it also directed the campus to ban the use of masks that, in the post-COVID era of protests, have emboldened violent demonstrators with anonymity.

The administration’s order to stop race-based bias was in accordance with civil rights statutes, and a recent Supreme Court decision specifically banning affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere.

No matter. Harvard claimed that the Trump administration infringed upon its First Amendment rights.

So, it has temporarily rejected the administration’s orders. At least for now, Harvard has lost its annual $2.2 billion grant of federal funds.

Former President Barack Obama, among others, lauded Harvard’s rejection of the demands of the administration’s anti-Semitism task force. He claimed the Trump administration’s efforts were ham-handed.

But what academic freedom are Harvard and Obama talking about? The freedom to discriminate and segregate by race in hiring, admissions, dorms, and graduations?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Nazi Skeletons in Wesleyan U.’s Closet by Rafael Medoff

By on April 17th, 2025

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/380765/the-nazi-skeletons-in-wesleyan-u-s-closet/

 The president of Wesleyan University claimed, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that the Trump administration and the Republican Party are teeming with secret or aspiring Nazis. But how did the Wesleyan administration relate to the actual Nazis and Nazi supporters on its Connecticut campus in the 1930s?

    In February 1934, Wesleyan invited Dr. Friedrich Auhagen, a representative of Nazi Germany’s consulate in New York City, to address the student body. That was more a year after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. A year of the Nazi regime boycotting Jewish-owned businesses, of nationwide book-burnings, of Nazi takeovers of German universities, of mass firings of Jews from most professions, and of sporadic anti-Jewish violence.  Yet none of that deterred the Wesleyan administration from inviting a Nazi official to campus.

    In his remarks to the Wesleyan students, Auhagen railed against “excessive Jewish control” in Germany, claimed that reports of antisemitism were “widely exaggerated,” and declared that Jews who did not like living under Nazism should “go settle in certain regions of Russia.”

    Hitler had some fans on the Wesleyan campus. The most enthusiastic was Paul H. Curts, a longtime professor of German. He was so sympathetic to the Nazis that he was cheering for them even before they rose to power. In a May 1932 speech, eight months before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Prof. Curts declared that supporters of the Nazi Party generally were “staid, sober Germans.”

    After Hitler and the Nazis became Germany’s rulers, Prof. Curts served as their lead apologist at Wesleyan. He made multiple trips to Germany in the 1930s, each time returning brimming with enthusiasm. After one such trip in 1934, Prof. Curts addressed the entire student body and told them Hitler was “the only man who could offer to Germany what it needed at present.” 

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