EDUCATION Comments turned off

We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One. I left my post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis to build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth. Pano Kanelos

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-cant-wait-for-universities-to?token=ey

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 disinvitation campaigns since 2000. Roughly half were successful. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Constitution Just Keeps Frustrating Obama and the Dems By David Harsanyi

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-constitution-just-keeps-frustrating-obama-and-the-dems/

Obama helped popularize and normalize the idea that executive overreach was acceptable if the president claimed there was moral imperative to act.

I f it’s not the Supreme Court, or the Electoral College, or states’ rights, or equal Senate representation, or most of the Bill of Rights standing in the way of “progress,” it’s the Treaty Clause. Without it, Barack Obama would already have slowed the oceans’ rise and allowed our beleaguered planet to heal. Just ask him.

This week, the former president, owner of multiple homes — including an $11.75 million mansion on 30 acres in Martha’s Vineyard — had some complaints at the United Nations Climate Change Conference about our profligate habits. Then he said this:

It takes some nuclear-powered audacity for Barack Obama, of all people, to whine about unilateral governance. The only reason Donald Trump was able to “unilaterally” withdraw from any international agreement was that the previous president had enlisted the nation in said agreement without the consent of Congress. The Paris Accord is allegedly the most critical international agreement ever forged by mankind, and yet it wasn’t quite important enough to be subjected to genuine national debate or the checks and balances of American government.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Influential Lenin Sisters Angela Davis gets her racist indoctrination and Saule Omorova seeks to impose Soviet banking. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/bidens-influential-lenin-sisters-lloyd-billingsley/

“I’m told I should start with AP, Zeke Miller,” said Joe Biden in Rome last month. Back in August, Biden told reporters “I was instructed” to call on Kelly O’Donnell from NBC. Biden didn’t reveal the identity of his instructors, but it’s not a tough call.

The lead puppeteer is doubtless the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. As Drew Allen notes, this is Obama’s third term, but another leftist star is pulling Biden’s strings on matters more important than a press conference.

During the 2020 campaign, Angela Davis supported Joe Biden as the candidate “who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement.” As parents have noticed, the Biden Junta is all-in with BLM and 1619 Project indoctrination. Embattled parents, smeared by the Biden DOJ as domestic terrorists, might wonder about this person who wields such influence.

In her Women’s March speech in January, 2017, Davis (pictured above) proclaimed “history cannot be deleted like web pages.” That invites review of episodes from Davis’ own history.

Davis gained fame for supporting Black Panther George Jackson, who killed a guard at Soledad Prison. In 1970, Davis brought the arsenal of weapons for Jackson’s brother Jonathan, who charged into a Marin County courtroom and took hostages. In the ensuing shootout, four people were killed and judge Harold Haley’s head blown off.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Our World Gone (Climate) Mad

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/09/our-world-gone-climate-mad/

Each day the media are filled with “news” stories blaming various events and conditions on “climate change,” which are of course code words for “humans are overheating their planet.” Never do these reports offer evidence that mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions are to blame. That the press feels there’s no reason to back its claims with facts indicates that a large segment of the West has bought fully and uncritically into the narrative.

Some days it seems as if it’s useless to continue to fight the fight against global warming. Politicians, “journalists,” activists, activist scientists, celebrities, and a substantial portion of the public tell us that human activity is causing Earth to warm and there’s no more to the story than that. Skepticism is equated with denial. Questions are verboten. Aligning with the alarmists’ account is the only acceptable response.

This is how batty our world has become: According to a local newspaper, a British Columbia doctor diagnosed a patient to be suffering from “climate change.” Which might be the case, since the global and local climates are always in a state of change, and can at times be severe enough to cause injuries and death, though risk of climate-related fatalities has fallen 99% over the last 100 years.

But was the good doctor referring to natural climate cycles? Or was his diagnosis intended as a complaint about modern living that requires the consumption of fossil fuels? No one would go wrong by guessing the latter.

While much of the First World is suffering from climate derangement syndrome, the global warming scare offers great opportunities for graft, corruption, and greater political power to “leaders” who know better but use the ginned-up crisis to harden the bubbles they live in.

Leave it to Greta Thunberg, maybe the most well-known victim of CDS, to expose the charade. The perpetual protester noticed that the still-in-progress United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, “has turned into a (public relations) event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the global north countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular Charles Lipson

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/08/john_durham_is_getting_close_to_the_jugular_146702.html

Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.

The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.

What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. The question now is whether Durham can expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.

Durham’s latest indictment charges Igor Danchenko (pictured) with lying multiple times to the FBI. Danchenko, who worked at the Brookings Institution as a Russian expert, may not be a household name, but he was a crucial player in concocting the false story that Donald Trump was collaborating with the Kremlin to win the White House. The real conspiracy, it turns out, was aimed at Trump and was conducted by the Clinton campaign and her longtime associates. It was financed jointly by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Some leaked emails suggested it was approved by the candidate herself. The FBI continued running with it long after it had ample evidence to know it was a concoction. House Democrats ran with it even longer, basking in fulsome, uncritical media coverage. All of it was false.

The Danchenko indictment matters because his bogus information was the heart of the “Steele dossier,” which, in turn, was the heart of the anti-Trump investigation. The dossier was compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by people working for Clinton. Steele claimed his information about Trump, including salacious sexual allegations, came from Russian sources. It didn’t. It came from Danchenko, who was working at a Washington think tank. As Danchenko admitted to the FBI, much of what he told Steele was old rumors or exaggerations. Some of it appears to have  been simply fabricated. Steele incorporated it, and the Democrats deployed it.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Down the QAnon rabbit hole The conspiracy theorists are still around and they have big insights about JFK and the Devil by Ben Sixsmith

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/down-qanon-rabbit-hole/

Lies, in many cases, are comparable to sparks. They might not be very dangerous in and of themselves but under the right conditions — or, perhaps, the wrong conditions — they can lead to spectacular fires.

Consider, for example, how a chain of events that began with an anonymous message being posted on an obscure message board in October 2017 led, four years later, to hundreds of Americans gathering in Dallas, Texas, to await the return of the long dead JFK Jr.

Back in October 2017, someone calling themselves “Q” began posting bizarre messages on the /pol/ board of the notorious website 4Chan. Q, claiming to have high level White House security clearance, spoke of “the Storm,” an event in which President Trump and his allies would arrest hundreds of his rivals and expose them as child-eating Luciferians. Somehow, this event failed to transpire.

In fact, Q had something of a talent for failed predictions. He, and his followers in the colorful pro-Trump movement that we know as “QAnon,” predicted the arrests of everyone from Hillary Clinton to Tom Hanks, all of whom have remained conspicuously free. They predicted that Donald Trump would be inaugurated, which, somehow, has failed to happen.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nancy Pelosi is losing her grip She’s put congressional Democrats in a terrible position — and midterms are coming. By Michael Dahlberg

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nancy-pelosi-losing-her-grip-democrats/

Top Democrats took a media victory lap last weekend, crowing about the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that finally cleared the House on Friday night after months of false starts and intra-party squabbling. The vote came only after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her latest Hail Mary, attempted to satisfy progressive lawmakers by also allowing a procedural vote on the massive social spending bill craved by liberals. Even then, Pelosi was forced to rely on a handful of Republicans to secure a majority.

Predictably, the White House was eager to spin the bill’s passage as major win for the Biden agenda, claiming it would energize voters and pave the way for trillions more in government spending just in time for the holidays. And yet, despite the high fives and happy talk with reporters, many congressional Democrats will surely spend this week’s recess reflecting on the months of chaotic leadership that preceded the vote. Some will no doubt conclude, if they haven’t already, that they are watching a speaker in decline and a leadership team losing its grip on its own party.

For House Democrats, who face voters in less than a year, that’s an uncomfortable place to be.

While there has been some handwringing on the right over Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s inability to keep 13 of his members from voting for the bill, such criticism overlooks a political reality. As others have noted, infrastructure was always destined to reach the president’s desk, with or without Republican support. Even if reconciliation talks broke down and the entire process became unsalvageable, Democrats were never heading into the midterms without at least one more legislative achievement. Faced with a binary choice of spending less money than they had hoped for or spending nothing at all, it was a safe bet that eventually progressives would opt for the former.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Kristallnacht: A nationwide pogrom Any suggestion that German Jews were passive in leaving after Kristallnacht are mistaken. Most of those who could escape did so. Many could not. Dr. Alex Grobman

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/316525

Between the late evening hours of November 9, and the early morning of the 10th, the German rioters destroyed and firebombed 1,000 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, leaving many of them burning during the night in full view of the public and local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. Explosives were used in some locations to wreck the buildings. [1]

The shop windows of an estimated 7,500 commercial establishments out of approximately 9,000 Jewish-owned stores were smashed and their merchandise looted or scattered on the sidewalk and streets.[2] It as estimated the amount of plate glass shattered equaled half the yearly production of the plate-glass industry of Belgium, from which the glass had been imported.[3]

Schoolboys were in the vanguard of many attacks against the Jews, and in breaking windows. Teachers provided them with clubs for them to demolish Jewish businesses.[4]

Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, initiated the nation-wide pogrom without any well-defined objective or any strategy as to the methods that would be employed. This led to a “hasty and improvised organization” causing “messiness and miscommunication.” Aside from being disorganized, impulsive and chaotic, “the lack of control” is what terrified the victims. [5]

The magnitude of murder, rape and sexual attacks (the extent to which will never be known), the systematic public humiliations, indiscriminate looting of private homes, loss of property and the level of terror that ensued, shocked the nation and unnerved the regime.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Eating Knesset candy and drinking the Kool-Aid Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/eating-knesset-candy-and-drinking-the-kool-aid/

 Photos that emerged last week of Israeli lawmakers munching on candy for two white nights in a row served as a perfect metaphor for the kindergarten-like atmosphere of the Knesset as a whole and the current government in particular.

Though the assortment of sweets was there for a “serious” purpose—to provide an energy boost to the exhausted parliamentarians during the wee hours of Thursday and Friday, when they debated and voted on the 2021 and 2022 state budgets—there was something both comical and disconcerting about the display

The sight of Defense Minister Benny Gantz sucking on a pink lollipop, for example, was a bit cringe-inducing. The mullahs in Tehran must have gotten a kick out of it. Or at least wondered why the Israeli figure charged with targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities opted for a sucker over strong Middle Eastern coffee.

In fairness to Gantz, he wasn’t alone. Indeed, the whole lollipop-licking plenum looked as puerile as it’s been sounding these days, with childish verbiage and decibel levels not even fit for a playground.

Nor did the final passage of the budgets put a stop to the infantile behavior. On the contrary, the aftermath of the marathon that kept the government from falling has been just as embarrassing, if not more.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Friends of Igor Danchenko   The plot thickens as Special Counsel John Durham indicts a Russian Washington-based think-tanker for lying to the FBI about the rumors he passed on to Christopher Steele for his “dossier.” by George Parry

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectator.org/the-friends-of-igor-danchenko/

The Trump-Russia collusion hoax is the most successful and destructive partisan political scam in the history of our nation. Based on lies portraying Donald Trump as a covert Russian operative, it was cited by the Obama-era FBI and Justice Department as the putative justification for using the nation’s vast intelligence apparatus to investigate Trump and concomitantly benefit Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The underlying lies were compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele upon whose “dossier” the FBI based its FISA warrant applications to spy on Trump advisor Carter Page and, by extension, Trump and his presidential campaign. The Steele Dossier consists of 17 now-discredited reports which collectively allege that Trump was subject to blackmail by the Kremlin for bizarre sexual behavior in a Moscow hotel and that his campaign operatives were conspiring with the Russians to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

When he wrote those reports, Steele was working under contract with Fusion GPS, a private investigations firm that had been retained by Marc Elias, legal counsel to the Clinton campaign, to do opposition research on Trump.

Well after the 2016 election, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) reviewed the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.

According to the OIG’s report, Steele was hired by Fusion GPS to investigate, among other things, “whether there were any ties between the Russian government and Trump or his campaign. Steele’s work for Fusion GPS resulted in his producing numerous election-related reports.” With Fusion GPS’s authorization, he “directly provided more than a dozen of his reports to the FBI between July and October 2016, and several others to the FBI through [DOJ attorney Bruce] Ohr and other third parties.”

The OIG found that that the FBI used Steele’s information to obtain FISA warrants to conduct electronic surveillance of Page. In its warrant applications, the FBI advised the court that “Steele was believed to be a reliable source for three reasons: his professional background; his history of work as an FBI CHS [confidential human source] since 2013; and his prior non-election reporting, which the FBI described as ‘corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.’”

In other words, the FBI averred under oath that, based on Steele’s credibility, derogatory information about Trump and his campaign warranted investigation by means of electronic surveillance.

The OIG also found that, in October 2016, Steele provided briefings regarding his findings to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. In each, Steele’s credibility as an experienced former British agent who worked Russian intelligence was a material factor in establishing the credibility of the Trump-Russia collusion smear.