EDUCATION Comments turned off

John D. Sailer How DEI Bureaucrats Control University Hiring Internal documents reveal how administrators use “diversity checks” to influence the hiring process and engage in discrimination.

Posted By on July 8th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/university-hiring-dei-diversity-checks-discrimination

In early 2021, Carma Gorman, an art history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the designated “diversity advocate” for a faculty search committee, emailed John Yancey, the College of Fine Arts’ associate dean of diversity, seeking approval to proceed with a job search.

“I wanted to make sure that the demographics of our pool pass muster,” Gorman wrote. She noted that 21 percent of applicants were from underrepresented minority groups, with another 28 percent self-identifying as Asian.

“The 21% is enough to move forward,” Yancey replied, but he cautioned that concerns could arise depending on how the applicant pool was narrowed. “If 20 of the 23 URM applicants are dropped in the early cut,” he wrote, “then things don’t look good anymore.”

The exchange, which I obtained through an open-records request, offers a window into a diversity practice adopted at many universities. Documents I’ve acquired from institutions across the country—hiring plans, grant proposals, progress reports, and internal emails—show that routine diversity checks are now embedded throughout the hiring process, often enforced with serious consequences for searches that fail to “pass muster.”

This practice raises not only significant legal questions but also highlights how such policies can concentrate power in the hands of individual administrators, granting them effective veto authority over one of a university’s most consequential decisions: the hiring of tenure-track faculty.

In 2023, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17, banning racial preferences and the employment of diversity officers. But just two years earlier, the situation at UT–Austin looked very different.

The documents tell the story. As diversity advocate, Gorman—coauthor of the annotated bibliography Decentering Whiteness in Design History—proposed a detailed diversity plan for her search committee. The plan, which I obtained via a records request, outlined a rigorous process for monitoring diversity at every stage of the hiring process.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Mamdani’s Shocking Claim: Blames America For al-Qaeda Terrorist’s Rise Liz Peek

Posted By on July 8th, 2025

https://lizpeek.com/news/mamdanis-shocking-claim-blames-america-for-al-qaeda-terrorists-rise/?utm_source=newsletter.lizpeek.com&utm_medium

Zohran Mamdani, the self-described socialist who is the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, has faced renewed scrutiny over past comments regarding Anwar al-Awlaki, the former head of Al Qaeda in Yemen. The New York Post reports, in previous social media posts, Mamdani appeared to suggest that U.S. law enforcement actions contributed to al-Awlaki’s radicalization and eventual embrace of jihadist ideology. These remarks were made in the context of a New York Times article that criticized the FBI’s surveillance of al-Awlaki, noting his ties to the 9/11 hijackers.

According to The Post, “Mamdani, in a series of tweets in 2015, bizarrely criticized the terrorism — after reading a New York Times account of the snooping, which revealed the cleric’s hooker fetish. ‘Why no proper interrogation of what it means for FBI to have conducted extensive surv. into Awlaki’s private life?’ the socialist candidate wrote.

In another post, Mamdani wrote, “How could #Awlaki have ever trusted@FBI to not release surveillance esp. if he continued to critique [the] state? Why no further discussion of how #Awlaki’s knowledge of surv. eventually led him to #alqaeda? Or what FBI’s surveillance of al-Awlaki — and claimed the G-Men actually pushed him into that says about [the] efficacy of surv?”

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, was an American Islamic who became one of the most influential figures in Al Qaeda. He was linked to several terrorist plots. According to The Post, al-Awlaki directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up US cargo planes in 2010,’ Obama said at the time. ‘And he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.’”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Twenty-One Things to Know About Zohran Mamdani Meet the privileged, salon Bolshevik with multimillionaire parents. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on July 8th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/twenty-one-things-to-know-about-zohran-mamdani/

1. Mamdani is a salon Bolshevik. His mother is Mira Nair, a millionaire movie director. It was Mira Nair who tried to have the actress Gal Gadot banned from the Oscars because she is Israeli.

2. In 2013, Mamdani retweeted an article by Glenn Greenwald which defended the Muslim killers of Drummer Lee Rigby, who used a machete to murder him on a London street, arguing that Rigby was a legitimate target because he was a soldier.

3. Mamdani has repeatedly refused to say that Israel, as the state of the Jewish people, has a right to exist. During an event hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York last month, Mamdani declined to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

He said instead that “I believe that Israel has a right to exist with equal rights for all,” in a “carefully worded response when asked, sidestepping the issue of Israel’s existence specifically as a ‘Jewish state’ and seemingly suggesting Israeli citizens do not enjoy equal rights. Then during a New York City Democratic mayoral debate, he once again refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, sparking immediate backlash among the other candidates.”

4. “In 2023, while speaking at a Democratic Socialists of America convention in New York, Mamdani encouraged the audience to applaud for Palestinian American community activist Khader El-Yateem, saying, “If you don’t clap for El-Yateem, you’re a Zionist.” Apparently, in Mamdani’s view, being a Zionist — supporting the right of Jews to a state of their own — is a terrible thing.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can Our Cities Be Saved From The Left’s Death Grip?

Posted By on July 8th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/08/can-our-cities-be-saved-from-the-lefts-death-grip/

All the attention being thrown at New York’s mayoral primary race, won by socialist Zohran Mamdani, raises broader questions that deserve answers. Why do voters keep electing Democrats responsible for so much urban decline and decay? What will break the left’s stranglehold on our once great cities? Is the situation simply hopeless?

Of the nation’s largest 20 cities, only two have Republican mayors – Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Republicans hold the mayorships of just 25 of the 100 largest cities. And that number is down from 30 in 2020.
More mysterious is the paradox that, despite the fact that blame for empty stores, rising crime, and the exodus of people rests squarely on the shoulders of Democrats in most of these cities, voters rarely hand control over to Republicans.

Look at the history of the 10 largest cities and despair.

Los Angeles has had one Republican mayor since 1961. New York has had one and a half since 1969 (Michael Bloomberg had been a lifelong Democrat, but ran as a Republican in 2001 and 2005, and then left the GOP midway through his second term).

Chicago has been electing Democratic mayors since 1931, and Houston since 1982.

Phoenix has elected Democrats for 20 years (a Republican was twice appointed as an interim mayor).

In Philadelphia, the last time a Republican was mayor was in 1948, and it’s been 24 years since San Antonio voters picked a GOP candidate for the city’s top office.

The other three of the top 10 cities – Dallas, San Diego, and Jacksonville – have been notable exceptions, with each having a fair share of mayors from both political parties.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Judge-Emperor: The Global Coup of the Courts by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on July 8th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21730/judge-emperor-courts

In the West, it is not the executive that threatens the separation of powers. It is faceless judges lacking democratic legitimacy who legislate on the pretext of judging…. [T]his judicial imperialism… [has] become a judicial tyranny….

These innovations… have gradually established the Israeli Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of all questions, not only legal but also political. Any Israeli citizen — and any NGO, even one funded from abroad — has the right to ask the Supreme Court to overturn any democratic decision…. There is no decision of the Israeli government and parliament that cannot be overturned by unelected judges.

[Marine Le Pen and her supporters] argued, accurately, that the judges were essentially preventing the French people from voting for Le Pen.

There is effectively no longer a single “right-wing” measure that can be adopted in any field by Parliament or the government without being struck down by the Constitutional Council or the courts. When the left loses at the ballot box, it is certain to win in the courts. In France, the judge reigns and the people no longer seem to have sovereignty over anything.

The torrents of universal rules and requirements deriving from articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (e.g. privacy, dignity), and the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights are probably the worst modern example of tyrannical judicial imperialism. The anarchy of immigration in Europe is entirely of its making.

The US Supreme Court decided last week that the district court judges had jurisdiction over specific cases and plaintiffs in their districts — not across the nation.

“The judges of the nation are only the mouth that pronounces the words of the law, inanimate beings who can neither moderate its force nor its rigor.”
— Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Book XI, Chapter VI

From Israel to the United States, via Europe, the judicial coup d’état has become permanent. In the West, it is not the executive that threatens the separation of powers. It is faceless judges lacking democratic legitimacy who legislate on the pretext of judging. Here are four salient examples of this judicial imperialism — which have become a judicial tyranny — and a proposed American solution.

Israel

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Israeli Supreme Court introduced three innovations that revolutionized Israel’s legal and political landscape. First, it abolished the “standing” requirement, allowing anyone to challenge any government decision before the Supreme Court simply because they disagreed with it, even if they were not personally affected by it. This is unique in the Western world. Second, the Court removed the restriction on justiciability, placing all government and administrative actions (including foreign affairs, military actions and the budget) under its control — an extraordinary measure. Third, the Court took on the power to assess the “reasonableness” of government decisions, thus giving itself a political veto over the elected government’s choices.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Do Not Rely on Egypt or Any Arab State to Bring Security to Gaza by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on July 7th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21732/gaza-security-egypt

There are also concerns that the tunnels could be used to smuggle terrorists into Gaza.

The Egyptians chose to ignore the smuggling as long as the weapons were making their way into the Gaza Strip and not staying in Egyptian territory. After all, these weapons were being used against Israel, not Egypt. The weapons did not pose any threat to Egypt’s national security. In addition, Egyptian military and police officers apparently benefitted by accepting bribes.

By turning a blind eye to the massive smuggling industry, Egypt significantly contributed to transforming the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip into a major base for Islamist terrorism, paving the way for the October 7 attack on Israel.

Egypt never did anything to stop Hamas from staging a coup against the Palestinian Authority and seizing control of the Gaza Strip. Egypt failed to stop the flow of weapons into the Gaza Strip. Egypt does not care about the Palestinians or Israel. It only cares about its own interests, and that is why it would be a big mistake to rely on the Egyptians or any Arab state to bring security and stability to the Gaza Strip.

Since the Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, 2023, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have discovered an estimated 90 tunnels crossing under the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The tunnels have been used by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups to smuggle rockets and weapons into the Gaza Strip. According to Israeli military sources, there may be additional tunnels that have not been discovered. There are also concerns that the tunnels could be used to smuggle terrorists into Gaza.

The smuggling, which increased after Hamas’s violent and brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, took place under the watchful eyes of Egypt, if not with its willing assistance.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In Melbourne, the Latest Pogrom Roger Franklin

Posted By on July 7th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/anti-semitism/in-melbourne-the-latest-pogrom/

Let it drop in a casual conversation that you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States — half an adult lifetime in my case — and it can be quite the cue for a recitation of misconceptions. Oh, America, so violent, so heartless and cruel to its poor, so racist in closing borders to illegal aliens and deporting those already there! Read Tony Wright’s paint-by-numbers column in today’s Nine rags and you’ll get a quick taste of the shallow silliness that passes for informed commentary in the Australian press.

Or go back a further couple of days and find the same SMH and Age giving opinionista space to a young lawyer’s utter delight that Zohran Mamdani, a red-raggin’ Muslim intent on “seizing the means of production”, has just won the Democrats’ mayoral primary in New York City. Unmentioned was that only 5% of eligible voters bothered to cast their ballots and that Mamdani’s chances of ever being addressed as ‘Hizzoner’ are slim to non-existent. New Yorkers can be quite odd at times, but they’re not that stupid. It’s as if, somewhere over the Pacific, there’s a wrinkle in the time-space continuum that twists, distorts or simply erases news and views flowing our way.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at a church in Wayne, Michigan, where a young man armed to the teeth set out to massacre the congregation at their prayers. He managed to get off a few shots and wound a church elder, but that was it before he was himself cut down by church members who whipped out their own guns and returned fire. It barely rated a mention in Australia’s legacy media, notions of gun-crazy Americans having at it being par for the course, so where is the news in one more volley of shots?

What brings all this to mind is Melbourne’s latest shame, for on Friday night in Trashcanistan on the Yarra a piece of bipedal filth allegedly tried to burn down Victoria’s oldest synagogue and incinerate the 20-or-so Jews inside. Meanwhile, a flying squad of keffiyeh’d thugs invaded Miznon, a Jewish-owned restaurant in the Hardware Lane foodies’ strip, roughing up diners and overturning tables while chanting ‘Death to the IDF’. That the owner/chef is an Israeli was all the reason they needed. (Update: Police have now arrested a NSW man and charged him with various arson-related offences).

It would be shocking were such incidents not now commonplace. In December arsonists destroyed the Adass Israel Synagogue, and only last week, another synagogue, this one in South Yarra, was desecrated with graffiti hailing Iran and demanding ‘freedom’ for Palestine. If you remember Melbourne as once it was, a place where it was safe to be a Jew and the insanity of the wider world’s hatreds seemed so far very away, the response can only be tears.

Not that Premier Jacinta Allan was sobbing. Tears would have interrupted the flow of her boilerplate empathy. “This is disgraceful behaviour by a pack of cowards,” Ms Allan said. “That this happened on Shabbat makes it all the more abhorrent.”

ANTI-SEMITISM, OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Free Speech vs Personal Safety Peter O’Brien

Posted By on July 7th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/the-law/free-speech-vs-personal-safety/

“Yes, Jewish Australians – even though you have contributed to this nation since the First Fleet and even though your families and friends are being murdered in Israel, and elsewhere, by the very forces these wielders of free speech are promoting – toughen up.”

Free speech has gotten a bit of a run recently, following, inter alia, the Glastonbury kerfuffle and the Wassim Haddad ruling.

Our esteemed editor in chief, Rebecca Weisser, has a powerful piece in the Spectator about Glastonbury, the appalling behaviour of some of the performers, and the crass stupidity of the BBC in allowing some segments to go to air.  She makes some pretty uncontroversial points – indeed, unarguable, in my view.  And yet, she attracted a number of unfavourable comments, a couple of which I reproduce below.

John Jacobsen opined:

Rebecca Weisser’s piece reads like someone clutching pearls while the rest of the world’s trying to have an honest convo. Yeah, some stuff said at Glastonbury was intense—but that’s literally what free speech protects: the right to say provocative, uncomfortable things. You don’t have to agree with the artists, but trying to paint a whole music festival as a jihadist warm-up act is just unhinged. Art is messy. Politics is messy. Get over it. This is like the Trumpification of conservatism. Dumbed down into right-wing “woke”.

And Sirtony added:

If you support free speech, and I do, you have to put up with stupid speech that you find offensive. You, of course, are fully entitled to argue about those views and to say why you find them wrong or offensive. Free speech is useless if we only allow those we agree with to speak. As fashions ebb and flow, what else might be banned that you might actually be sympathetic towards. Stop and think before agreeing to many limits on free speech. Our traditional limits have been on the incitement to violence or the classic shouting “fire” in the crowded theatre not the expression of a political idea.

Is chanting “death, death to the IDF” inciting violence? The argument can be made that it is, but seriously does anyone expect any of these idiots to take on the Israeli military; it is performative nonsense.

The aim of this article is to provide a counterpoint to these opinions, but a couple of specific comments before I proceed.  Firstly, the performers were undoubtedly trying to turn the festival into a ‘jihadist warm-up’ act, and the organisers allowed them to politicize an artistic event. 

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

How the media echoes Hamas propaganda Natasha Hausdorff on the lies used to demonize Israel.

Posted By on July 7th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/07/how-the-media-echoes-hamas-propaganda/

Israel has come to be the most demonized nation on Earth. Its actions in Gaza are continually vilified as ‘genocidal’. Last month’s air strikes against Iran were denounced as ‘unprovoked’ and ‘illegal’. In the one-sided narrative that is now dominant in the West, the Jewish State is the aggressor, while the terror groups and regimes that attack it are cast as innocent victims. Natasha Hausdorff – barrister and legal director at the UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust – joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to debunk the lies we are constantly told about Israel. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How degraded has the debate become around Israel right now?

Natasha Hausdorff: It’s been deteriorating extremely rapidly – but this is perhaps unsurprising. For decades, we have had a media that, for the most part, propagates the lies of terrorist organisations. This has come to a head in everything we have seen being reported, in particular out of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Ultimately, it is misinformation that has been informing – or perhaps disinforming – public debate.

O’Neill: What did you think when you saw a very large crowd of privileged Britons chanting ‘death to the IDF’?

Hausdorff: Let’s be clear that this was essentially calling for death to Jews. It is simply an evolution of ‘From the river to the sea’, which we’ve heard from 7 October onwards.

I saw a distinct lack of pretense to this sort of unbridled Jew hate. Glastonbury has been a very unwelcome place for Jews and Israelis for years. It was reported that there was even a Hitler flag being displayed on some of the tents. This is deeply, deeply concerning – but likely only the tip of the iceberg. There are many people who have been swept up in all this because they think it’s the fashionable thing. Apparently, it’s the way that you demonstrate your moral credentials these days – by siding with internationally proscribed terrorist organisations and saying things like ‘up Hamas’ and ‘up Hezbollah’.

O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim Israel is guilty of genocide?

Hausdorff: Not only is it grotesque, it has no basis in reality whatsoever. But it is being advanced with a very particular purpose. I remember being on SABC – the South African version of the BBC – just after South Africa had brought its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). My counterpart said, ‘Isn’t it marvelous now we can finally use Israel and genocide in the same sentence, and nobody can tell us otherwise?’.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Frightening Dream House of Zoran Mamdani Zoran Mamdani built his dream on radical chic—but now that he’s winning, he’s scrambling to bury the blueprint. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 7th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/07/the-frightening-dream-house-of-zoran-mamdani/

After his first-place win in the New York City mayoral primaries, Zoran Mamdani is furiously denying everything that he once glibly thought was cutting-edge and cool.

So, like a good postmodern relativist, Mamdani now claims he didn’t really mean that violence was merely a “construct.”

I suppose Mamdani asked Jewish New Yorkers—the target of 44 percent of all hate crimes in the city—and discovered that their concussions and blood were all too real.

As a good soldier in the ranks of Black Lives Matter, Mamdani now insists he did not trash the police and advocate defunding them. Neither did he really, really mean to claim falsely he was African-American when he applied to college nor did really, really mean to do a video mocking the Jewish holiday of Hannukah.

Mamdani once thought it was cool to boast about defunding the police when he was an edgy, rising, left-wing community activist.

But then it was smarter to play it down as a candidate. And now it is essential to lie and deny it as a front-runner.

As a good communist, Mamdani echoed Karl Marx by bragging about his ultimate agenda: “the end goal of seizing the means of production.”

But whose “means of production” would Mamdani start seizing?

Trump Tower? Tesla dealerships? Amazon warehouses?

Mamdani warns us, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, frankly.”

Then, please tell us, how would you get rid of them?

Confiscate their money? Tax them at a 99 percent rate?

Maybe dox them and let the public handle the rest?

Mamdani brags he would “globalize the intifada.”

Given that most define the intifada (“shaking off”) as the two violent Palestinian waves of terrorism against Israel, what then does Mamdani mean by globalizing it?