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Ruth King

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Left’s War on the First Amendment … and the crisis of an illiberal media. Daniel Greenfield

By on July 28th, 2017

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. Like most left-leaning institutions it worked hard to prove its progressive premises. Democrats were good and Republicans bad. The police and the military were bad. Social welfare spending and diplomacy were good. Israel was bad and the PLO was good.

This was the thing we used to nostalgically call media bias.

We aren’t dealing with a liberal media anymore, but an illiberal media. The liberal media was content to use its institutional power as a megaphone to broadcast its views. But you could debate those views. Actual conservatives were allowed to write columns, and not just as a strategic attack on some element of the GOP the way it is now, and appear on television to offer opinions, and not just as punching bags.

The liberal media was convinced it would win the argument because it was right.

The illiberal media isn’t interested in winning an argument, but in silencing the opposition. It doesn’t just want to shout louder than you. It wants to use its institutional power to shut you up.

This isn’t just a media phenomenon. It’s what happened across the social spectrum when the people we used to call liberals became illiberal leftists. It’s why colleges censor controversial speakers and punish dissenting faculty. It’s why the environmental debate went from scientific discussions to calls to punish, fine and even jail those who question the left’s Luddite alarmism on Global Warming.

It’s why the debate over gay marriage shifted to punishing Christian bakers and florists, the arguments about Israel tilted to preventing musicians from performing in Tel Aviv and civil rights turned into a call to create “safe spaces” that ban everyone else. Diversity is no longer dressed up as an expansion, but is now explicitly a contraction. Don’t read books by white authors. Don’t hire more men. Kick Jews out of the gay rights rally. Send the IRS after conservative groups. Punch a Trump supporter in the face.

Nearly every leftist cause these days is expressed by punishing someone. Arguments are won by force. The illiberal totalitarian lurking inside the liberal, as David Horowitz described it, is out of the closet.

It’s a lot easier to spot illiberalism in the press and academia because they depend on the free exchange of ideas. It’s hard to spot creeping totalitarianism at the DMV or in any government bureaucracy. But it’s really easy to see the change on a college campus or in the pages of your local newspaper.

And that’s where the iron curtain truly falls on the First Amendment.

The modern campus is mired in trigger warnings and safe spaces. Faculty and administrators are lynched, buildings are burned, students are assaulted and dissent is ruthlessly silenced.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Immigration Law Enforcement and Human Trafficking What exactly is pro-immigrant and compassionate about Sanctuary Cities? Michael Cutler

By on July 28th, 2017

On July 23, 2017 police officers in San Antonio, Texas made the gruesome discovery of the bodies of eight illegal aliens who had succumbed to the extreme heat in a tractor-trailer in which they were being transported, along with dozens of others who were rushed to the hospital where two more died.

My 30 year career with the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) included an assignment to the Anti-Smuggling Unit (ASU) at the New York City District Office of the INS where I found that the alien smugglers / human traffickers we investigated and arrested were among the most pernicious and violent criminals I encountered during my career.

The U.S./Mexican border is notoriously dangerous. Several years ago, during the Obama administration, I was interviewed for a documentary that is well worth watching, The Border States of America: Every State Is Now A Border State.

Most of the filming was done along the U.S./Mexican border and includes interviews with ranchers and law enforcement officers who live and work along that border, providing insight and a perspective on the scope and violence of human trafficking that is seldom, if ever, reported upon by the mainstream media.

On July 24, 2017 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a news release, Federal alien-smuggling charge filed in San Antonio against driver of tractor-trailer when 10 died after smuggling trip that reported on this story and the fact that the driver of the vehicle, James Matthew Bradley Jr., is being charged in a federal complaint filed on July 24 alleging that he had unlawfully transported illegal aliens resulting in the death of 10 of those aliens. The press release noted that if convicted, Bradley would face a maximum punishment of life imprisonment or death, and a $250,000 fine.

To deter alien smuggling and related crimes, laws passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by past presidents certainly provide for some of the toughest penalties possible, yet today securing our borders against illegal entry, to combat alien smuggling and human trafficking, has for some, become extremely controversial.

This is only one of many of the incomprehensible inconsistencies where immigration is concerned, whether we consider how the media covers immigration or how some politicians, on all levels of government, view immigration law enforcement.

Transporting illegal aliens is an element of the smuggling statute: Title 8, United States Code §1324 because once across the border, these un-inspected illegal aliens need to travel from the borders to the interior of the United States, a need often fulfilled by the smugglers who facilitated their entry, once they are paid their exorbitant fees that virtually amount to ransom.

This can simply involve driving illegal aliens to airports and bus terminals or can involve transporting them in all sorts of motor vehicles including mobile homes and tractor-trailers.

The ICE press release also reported that the trailer had been packed with more than 100 illegal aliens who had been smuggled into the United States, held in a “stash house” and were being transported in the un-refrigerated trailer. The aliens had no water and took turns breathing through a couple of holes in the side of the trailer.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Deep State War On Trump’s Foreign Policy Agenda President’s policies on Israel, Iran, Qatar and climate change under attack by a rogue State Department. Joseph Klein

By on July 28th, 2017

The State Department’s own “deep state” is trying to sabotage President Trump’s foreign policy agenda. From the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran, Qatar and climate change, the State Department, under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is reported to be in “open war” with the White House. Key high level positions remain vacant as Obama holdovers “continue running the show and formulating policy, where they have increasingly clashed with the White House’s own agenda,” according to the Free Beacon. Secretary Tillerson has reportedly run interference to protect the Obama holdovers from being removed, allowing resistance to President Trump’s foreign policy agenda to flourish within the State Department.

The first casualty of this internal coup by the State Department’s deep state is Israel. The shadow of the Obama administration’s anti-Israel bias was reflected in a report the State Department released on July 17, 2017 entitled Country Reports on Terrorism 2016. It praised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for reiterating “his commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, and pursuit of an independent Palestinian state through peaceful means.” The report referred to what it called “significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence.”

The State Department report brushed aside clear evidence of a continuing barrage of incendiary rhetoric appearing on official Palestinian Authority and Fatah social media outlets and of inflammatory statements by Palestinian officials, including Abbas himself. Instead, it claimed that the Palestinian Authority “has made progress in reducing official rhetoric that could be considered incitement to violence.”

The State Department report conveniently skipped over the fact that Abbas remains committed to paying regular salaries to Palestinian terrorists imprisoned for killing Jews and to terrorists’ families. Their perfidiously named “Martyrs Fund” has a treasure chest of about $300 million dollars. That blood money comes in part from foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, some of which is contributed by American taxpayers. President Trump has spoken out against the ‘pay to slay Jews’ terrorist payments, but the State Department has turned a blind eye. Obama holdover Stuart Jones, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, is reported to have steered Secretary Tillerson into making the erroneous claim that the Palestinian Authority had ceased spending U.S. taxpayer funds to pay terrorists, according to the Free Beacon’s sources.

After reciting the litany of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis, the State Department report held Israel largely responsible:

“Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.”

Just a few hours after three members of an Israeli family were massacred by a Palestinian terrorist, a State Department official tried to defend the report’s conclusions on the drivers of Palestinian violence. The official sounded like a clinical psychologist or a social worker, declaring that there is “no one single pathway to violence—each individual’s path to terrorism is personalized, with certain commonalities.” This is the same type of irresponsible rhetoric used by the Obama administration in discussing the supposed root causes of what it called “violent extremism.”

The State Department has also carried over the Obama administration’s soft pedaling on Iran. Instead of presenting options to President Trump supporting a refusal to re-certify that Iran has complied with all of its obligations under the disastrous Obama nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department took Iran’s side. It recommended twice that President Trump sign certifications of Iran’s compliance. Deprived by the State Department of any analysis to the contrary, as he had requested, the president reluctantly signed the certifications in April and July. However, he has reportedly decided to sidestep the State Department going forward and rely instead on a White House team to prepare the way for refusing to sign the certification the next time it is presented to him. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, senior strategist Steve Bannon, and deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka opposed the State Department’s recommendation.

“The president assigned White House staffers with the task of preparing for the possibility of decertification for the 90-day review period that ends in October — a task he had previously given to Secretary Tillerson and the State Department,” a source close to the White House told Foreign Policy.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump Effect Deprogramming the American mind. Mark Tapson

By on July 28th, 2017

Six months into the Trump presidency, it seems safe to say that America has never had a political experience like the one he has brought to the White House. He has sparked a stark raving mad #resistance from the left that makes Bush Derangement Syndrome look fair and balanced. The news media hang on his every tweet. Hollywood is practically self-combusting in panic and disbelief. Climate change Cassandras are melting down. Illegal aliens are feeling the heat as well. He has even thrown his own party into turmoil. All of this hysterical disarray has resulted from the impact not of a movement or a Party, but of one man, Donald Trump.

Now a new documentary offers some thoughtful commentary on President Trump’s agitating arrival on the political scene. Produced, directed and edited by Agustin Blazquez, The Trump Effect: Deprogramming the American Mind features author and filmmaker Laurence Jarvik musing upon the rise of Trump and how this iconoclastic President is changing the way Americans think about ourselves and the world. Over the course of an hour of discussion, Jarvik’s primary thesis is that Trump is dismantling the politically correct ideology that has dominated American political discourse since 9/11, which will lead the way to a newfound freedom and unification of a country on its way to becoming great again.

Laurence Jarvik is the editor and publisher of Penny-A-Page Press and the author of PBS: Behind the Screen and Masterpiece Theater and the Politics of Quality. He is also the director of Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die, a documentary about America’s indifference to the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust. Agustin Blazquez is the Cuban filmmaker behind a seven-part Covering Cuba documentary series and the founder of UnCovering Cuba Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization.

“The Trump effect,” Jarvik begins, “is the deprogramming of the American mind, and Trump is the Deprogrammer-in-Chief.” Since the traumatic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Jarvik notes, “Americans have somehow been programmed, indoctrinated, sort of fed a lot of fantasy ideology, whether it’s in schools, whether in the media, whether in politics,” and the brainwashing and fear induced by this PC totalitarianism is similar to being immersed in a cult. The process of breaking free from its grip is not unlike the process whereby a cult follower is deprogrammed.

Jarvik is hopeful that Trump can break this spell; indeed, he is already doing it. “The techniques Trump is using are the same techniques used by deprogrammers,” he argues. “First they have to discredit the cult leader… [Trump] did it with the Clintons and the Bushes, and he did it with President Obama.”

“The second step is to show the contradictions between what they say and what they’re going to do on a policy or action level. Again, he did that,” and “that’s where the tweets come in.” Jarvik notes that Trump uses Twitter to constantly bombard the public with information and attacks on leftist hypocrisy and policy failures.

“The third stage,” Jarvik continues,

which is the tipping point in this, is that you have to get the cult member who is being deprogrammed to recognize reality. The cult creates a fantasy world that you live in. Once the cult follower is shown the leader can’t be trusted, that the policies make no sense, and then is exposed to what reality is, the former cult person can begin to think for him- or herself. So Trump has really been carrying out this experiment and deprogramming the whole country.

In this respect, Jarvik states, “Trump, far from being a Hitler figure,” which is the left’s constant refrain, “is a liberator.” Trump’s reliance on Twitter plays into that. Jarvik observes that it’s as if Trump saw the role that social media played in the so-called Arab Spring revolution and said to himself, We can have a Twitter revolution right here in the United States. Once Trump began to dominate Twitter with his round-the-clock tweets, Twitter felt the pressure and began censoring people, exposing the left’s authoritarian impulses. Trump showed that, as the great critics of totalitarianism like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler demonstrate in their novels, all it takes is one man to lead the way in challenging the power structure, and others will be inspired to follow suit. The next thing you know, a revolution is under way.

A great many misconceptions have built up around Trump, says Jarvik, and it’s important that they be dispelled. People have to realize, Jarvik insists, that “what Trump is most of all is a realist who represents a non-ideological, practical approach that is very much in keeping with his New York business background.” As a political outsider, Trump “was the right man at the right time because he wasn’t encumbered by all the constraints that other [politicians] had.”

Jarvik makes the interesting point that Trump, having come essentially from the entertainment world, is very familiar with the left but has rejected them, like a dissident to the Party. That makes him especially hated and dangerous. David Horowitz, the left’s most despised apostate, knows this experience intimately.

As for Trump breaking the chains of political correctness, Jarvik cites an insightful example. “Nothing is more politically incorrect than beauty pageants,” which absolutely outrage feminists. “Trump is the president who owned beauty pageants,” says Jarvik, and thus Trump has, in a way, helped to usher a renewed appreciation for beauty back into a culture that has been wallowing in PC ugliness.

Noting that nothing Trump’s critics hurl at him seem to derail him, Jarvik asserts that Trump is “pretty much bullet-proof.” “If Reagan was the ‘Teflon President,’” he says, “you could say Trump is the ‘Kevlar President.’” Jarvik is optimistic that the Trump presidency will move the nation forward and ultimately even resolve our political polarization.

Check out more of Laurence Jarvik’s thoughts in The Trump Effect below, and get more information about it here.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The EPA Still Hasn’t Been Held Accountable for the Gold King Mine Blowout It unleashed a million pounds of metal contaminants and covered up what happened. By Rob Gordon & Hans A. von Spakovsky

By on July 28th, 2017

Remember when your TV aired stunning images of a bright-orange river snaking through the West? Credit the EPA for that unnatural scene.

At Colorado’s Gold King Mine, our would-be environmental protectors blew out millions of gallons of acid-mine drainage and metal contaminants. By the EPA’s calculations, the blowout expelled over a million pounds of metal contaminants into the Animas River, including almost a half-ton of arsenic and eight and a half tons of lead. Yet two years later, no one at the EPA has been held accountable for this unmitigated environmental disaster.

Government accounts — including those from the Interior Department and the EPA’s inspector general — have consistently maintained that the EPA crew was seeking to excavate above the mine tunnel’s opening (the “adit”) and stay away from the blockage that plugged it when, somehow, the plug just gave way, unleashing the flood of pollutants. However, well-documented reports (here, here, and here) contradict that story.

One direct refutation came in an e-mail from the Interior Department’s lead Gold King Mine official. Within 48 hours of the blowout, the official e-mailed over a half-dozen colleagues that he had talked with his EPA counterpart in charge of the project. Attached to the e-mail was an undated, unsigned document that flatly contradicts the subsequent official reports:

On 8/5/2015, the EPA was attempting to relieve hydrologic pressure behind a naturally collapsed adit/portal of the Gold King Mine. The EPA’s plan was to slowly drain and treat enough mine water in order to access the inner mine working and assess options for controlling its discharge. While removing small portions of the natural plug, the material catastrophically gave-way and released the mine water.

In other words, the EPA crew was not trying to avoid the plug. It deliberately dug right into it, and the agency has been covering up and hiding its incompetence from Congress, the courts, and the public ever since. This account, rather than the official one, is consistent with the available photographic evidence.

The Daily Caller recently asked the EPA’s inspector general about this e-mail and how it squared with the IG’s report. The EPA IG told the Daily Caller that they viewed the DOI’s official report on the spill, rather than this telling e-mail sent right after the spill, “as the official position taken by the DOI.”

Seasoned investigators don’t give much weight to edited reports and rehearsed statements issued months after an event when contemporaneous e-mails among key players contradict “official positions” that may have been crafted to hide the truth. If the EPA were investigating a private corporation accused of causing this monumental environmental disaster, it would surely not accept the company’s report absolving itself of all responsibility if it flew in the face of statements made by key executives in the aftermath of the blow-out.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Wall Street Journal Editors Miss the Point on Sessions’s Recusal He wrongly assumed that the Russia probe was a criminal investigation. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 28th, 2017

My heart is with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which last night published an editorial defending Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the so-called Russia investigation. Unfortunately, my head cannot go along because the editors miss important points.

Preliminarily, the Journal addresses an aspect of President Trump’s unseemly public critique of his AG that has bothered me, too. Trump has said that if Sessions had informed the White House that he’d recuse himself from the Russia investigation, Trump would have nominated someone else for AG. The Journal counters that “the contours” of the investigation were not clear to Sessions until he started on the job in February.

I’m not sure I buy that — at least not completely. The FBI, CIA, and NSA released the non-classified public version of their report in early January. They indicated that there was an ongoing investigation of Russia’s interference in the election, and they spelled out the agencies’ theory that Putin had been trying to help the Trump campaign. Given that Sessions was a key figure in the Trump campaign and was about to take a position in which the FBI would answer to him, there were enough red flags to raise the prospect of a conflict situation.

Still, regardless of Sessions’s state of knowledge about the investigation, Trump was briefed on it in detail by the agency heads. Why should anyone assume it was incumbent on Sessions to raise any conflict-of-interest concerns? Trump was better informed on the matter. If, in nominating an AG, it was important to the incoming president to know the nominee’s position on disqualification, it was incumbent on Trump (or someone on the staff vetting nominations) to raise the issue. Obviously, we don’t know what discussions took place between the president-elect and his AG nominee. Assuming they failed to discuss this topic of great importance to Trump, however, I fail to see how that is Sessions’s fault — or at least, solely or principally Sessions’s fault.

Now, to the main point. As I recounted in yesterday’s column, Sessions expressly based his recusal on Section 45.2 of Title 28, Code of Federal Regulations. But that provision does not support his recusal. It says disqualification is necessary only if there is a criminal investigation or prosecution for which a prosecutor has a conflict of interest. The Russia investigation is not a criminal investigation; it is a counterintelligence investigation, which, for the reasons I outlined in the column, is saliently different from a criminal investigation.

In defending Sessions’s blind eye to this distinction, the Journal’s editors assert:

Some legal sages say this means Mr. Sessions did not have to recuse himself because this was a “counterintelligence,” not a criminal, probe. But you have to be credulous to think [the FBI’s then-director James] Comey would ignore potential crimes if he found them in the course of counterintelligence work. Mr. Sessions might have become a subject of the probe because of his meetings with the Russian ambassador.

This is wrongheaded. To take on the snark first, it is not a matter of being a “legal sage.” It was Sessions who cited a legal regulation as the basis for his recusal. It doesn’t require sagacity to point out that the regulation doesn’t say what he claims it says.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Canada: The Left’s Mirage The liberals’ cult of Justin Trudeau By Kyle Smith

By on July 28th, 2017

‘Justin Trudeau: Why Can’t He Be Our President?” asks the cover of the latest edition of Rolling Stone. Well, the Constitution. But let’s assume Canada’s prime minister was born an American citizen: On the strength of the slavering, feverish, we’re-in-heat-and-we-don’t-care-who-knows-it Rolling Stone profile, Trudeau couldn’t even get the nomination of the Democratic party.

Trudeau’s idyllic northern paradise is actually the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, and even Boy Band Angela Merkel doesn’t seem particularly eager to destroy the country’s fossil-fuel industry. Sensibly enough, he’s a big proponent of the Keystone Pipeline and Canada’s Kinder Morgan pipeline, which transports hydrocarbons between the oil sands of Alberta (which are “pockmarked,” RS gravely informs us, “like a B-52 bombing range”) and British Columbia. Sensibly enough, he notes that carbon-based fuel will be with us for quite some time: “One of the things that we have to realize is we cannot get off gas, we cannot get off oil, fossil fuels tomorrow — it’s going to take a few decades,” he tells RS. “Maybe we can shorten it, but there’s going to have to be a transition time.”

A few more decades of bowing and scraping to Big Carbon? Try selling that to American Democratic-party primary voters. Doesn’t Trudeau realize that climate change is an imminent existential threat, that fossil fuels are the ticking time bomb that will blow up the world? Trudeau lacks the necessary climate hysteria to be an American Democrat.

Yet Rolling Stone largely gives Trudeau a pass on his sheik-like affection for black gold and hurries on to other topics. Hey, Justin snowboards! He’s handsome! He loves diversity! RS is more interested in the fact that Trudeau’s defense minister is a member of a minority gruop: Harjit Sajjan was born in Punjab, India, wears a turban, and served in the Canadian military in Afghanistan. Women and minorities make up more than half his cabinet.

So here’s Rolling Stone’s politics: We’ll forgive you for turning Earth into a coal-black cinder as long as you keep cheering for identity politics in these final moments of suffering we share together. But if you really do want to live in a country led by Justin Trudeau, given that people not born American can’t actually be president of the United States, why not do what Rolling Stone writer Stephen Rodrick suggests in the kicker of his piece: “At this moment, Justin Trudeau’s Canada looks like a beautiful place to ride out an American storm.” Why won’t Justin’s American acolytes do what they keep promising to do and take off to the Great White North?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The quest to prove collusion is crumbling By Ed Rogers

By on July 28th, 2017

While everyone is fixated on President Trump’s unbecoming and inexplicable assault on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the media has been trying to sneak away from the “Russian collusion” story. That’s right. For all the breathless hype, the on-air furrowed brows and the not-so-veiled hopes that this could be Watergate, Jared Kushner’s statement and testimony before Congress have made Democrats and many in the media come to the realization that the collusion they were counting on just isn’t there.

As the date of the Kushner testimony approached, the media thought it was going to advance and refresh the story. But Kushner’s clear, precise and convincing account of what really occurred during the campaign and after the election has left many of President Trump’s loudest enemies trying to quietly back out of the room unnoticed.

Cable news airtime and in-print word count dedicated to the nonexistent collusion story appear to be dwindling. Democrats and their allies in the media seem less eager to talk about it, and when they do, they say something to the effect of “but, but, but … Kushner didn’t answer every question … He wasn’t under oath … There are still more witnesses … What about this or that new gadfly?” They are stammering. And it hasn’t taken long for news producers and editors to realize that the story is fading.

At last, the story that never was is not happening.

There are a few showstoppers from Kushner’s testimony that make it obvious to any fair-minded, thinking person that there was no collusion with Russia. In his own words, Kushner makes it clear that his actions were innocent but, at times, misguided and ill-conceived. He plainly states he had “hardly any” contacts with Russians during the campaign and found his June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the infamous Russian lawyer to be an absolute “waste of time.”

Democrats and their allies in the media have exhausted themselves building a scandalous narrative surrounding the Russian lawyer meeting, but according to Kushner, the meeting was so useless that he “actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after [he] had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”’ Maybe the collusion didn’t take very long, or maybe he realized what the lawyer had to say was a useless farce and he wanted to get on with his day.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

No Safe Space for Jews on Campus By Gary Bauer

By on July 28th, 2017

A dominant narrative about the Trump Administration is that Donald Trump’s election ushered in a new wave of anti-Semitism. It’s an absurd claim, given that among Trump’s top advisors, eleven are Jews, including his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

That’s not to say anti-Semitism isn’t a problem. In fact, it is on the rise. But if you want to find where anti-Semitism is running rampant, don’t look to the Oval Office. Look instead to the place where you’re least likely to find a Trump supporter, the college quad.

I know this because at the recent Christians United For Israel Washington Summit, I spent time with student activists from CUFI On Campus. I listened to their harrowing stories of harassment and intimidation that Jewish (and Christian) students face from left-wing professors and Palestinian student groups whenever they speak up in support of Israel or resist misguided boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) schemes that single out the Jewish state for punishment.

While many in the media portray anti-Semitism as a phenomenon of the right, it is among young liberals that it is growing the most. Several recent studies demonstrate just how pervasive anti-Semitism has become on college campuses. An April report by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry found that there has been a 45 percent rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses between 2015 and 2016.

A study by the Anti-Defamation League found that such incidents rose by a third in 2016 from 2015 and increased 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017. Several other studies put the share of Jewish college students who experience anti-Semitism on campus at anywhere from half to three quarters.

The problem isn’t confined to students making threats against or hurling anti-Semitic slurs at Jewish students. A recent lawsuit suggests school administrators are partly responsible for creating an environment that’s unsafe for Jewish students.

In June, a group of current and former students sued San Francisco State University alleging that the university fostered a climate of anti-Semitism “marked by violent threats to the safety of Jewish students on campus.” The students complain that they were intimidated and prevented from holding events. The environment became so hostile that the students say they became afraid to do anything to indicate that they are Jewish, such as wearing Star of David necklaces.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

No Male, No Female: Canadian Baby First with a ‘U’ on Birth Certificate By Sean Nolan

By on July 28th, 2017

Editor’s note: The poor child featured in this story is referred to below by masculine pronouns – not because we have information as to his gender, but as a grammatical convention called the gender-neutral “he,” sometimes used outside insane liberal enclaves for gender-ambiguous singular nouns like “someone” and “everyone.”

The tired, inaccurate, and overused dismissal hurled at theists by the liberal elite is “there is no God because science.” The hilarious irony is the inconsistency they utilize in weighing their own beliefs and decisions against “science.” So long as they can use “science” to absolve themselves from accountability to absolutes (read: God), it is their friend, but shame on anyone who challenges any of their more radical beliefs on scientific grounds.

Those medical experts who claim that gender is binary? Well, they are nothing more than bigots trying to hinder human flourishing. Science is useful only when it serves the purpose of silencing those outdated enough to oppose “progress.”

Marching at the head of the Progress Parade is a Canadian creature who goes by the name of Kori Doty. And the creature has just given birth to the future – a child who, after a brief dispute, is the first to have a “U” on his birth certificate where others have been confined to the outdated norm of “F” and “M.” The “U,” of course, is for “unassigned” or “undetermined.”

At War with Gravity

In other words, when people asked Kori (who is a tertium quid, identifying as neither male nor female), “Do you know if you’re having a girl or a boy?” the response was, “I’m waiting until it is old enough to decide for itself.”

The real head-scratcher is why Kori would allow “themself” (the pronoun of choice for those at war with, among other things, the outdated norms of binary genders, hereafter avoided) to be so closed-minded and limited. Has she not thought through the ramifications of labeling her offspring a person? Why is she limiting the generation that will inherit the future to the category of human?

Why not label her child a creature? Or better yet, a “being”? What if he grows up and decides he wants to identify as a yeti or a demogorgon, or some other fictitious creature? Who is Kori to tell her child that he must be human? Why stop there? So long as we’re freeing ourselves from the limitations of reality, what if the child decides he wants to be an inanimate object, like a slab of stone or the lost Ark of the Covenant?

I know, I know: this is too radical. The world is not ready for this type of progress quite yet. By proposing these outlandish ideas, I’m likely to get stoned. Let’s start off small and try to wrap our heads around Doty’s small step toward “progress.” Her aim: to remove gender from birth certificates, or at the very least give a third option.

As for me, it might be a while before I can legally identify as rubber. But as soon as I can, watch out, world, ’cause every stone you throw at me will bounce right back at you!

The Fight for Freedom to Be “Other”

Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think this sort of silliness is better left to the world of science fiction. The true victim here is Kori’s poor child, who gets the pleasure of being the subject of a ridiculous social experiment.

Doty is seeking to make history by fighting for the right to free our children from the outdated norms of being labeled male or female at birth. It is a difficult and unnecessary process, Doty argues, to attempt to change one’s gender at a later time in life. Then again, the denial of reality is always a difficult process. The man who identifies as a butterfly finds that out every time he jumps from the roof of his garage only to land on the cold, hard, familiar blacktop once again. Reality is so unforgiving to those who wish to live a fairy tale.

Kori is trying to remove any reference to gender from her own birth certificate as well. Should Kori fail, she’ll sleep better at night knowing that if not for her, at least her child and the next generation will be freed from the constraints of having to identify as a male or female (so long as he can avoid the pesky reminder between his legs).

Doty reminds us that it is discriminatory to assume that because someone has a penis or a vagina, that person is either a male or a female. Gender is a figment of the imagination to those who live in reality, and they must not assault those who live in alternate realities with their bigotries.

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