Hannah E. Meyers The Great Jackass-Terrorist Alliance New York’s wrongheaded criminal-justice reforms enabled the latest round of lawless pro–Palestine protests.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-great-jackass-terrorist-alliance

This weekend marked 100 days since Israeli civilians were brought as captives into Gazan tunnels: girls raped, men tortured.

Here, in hip New York, an unending series of escalating demonstrations hamper the city’s functioning and citizens’ general sense of trust and stability. What are the protesters calling for? An immediate Israeli ceasefire. Whom do they represent? An enormous coalition of jackasses.

If the thousands of Gothamites who pretend to care about Arabs (except when other Muslims oppress and slaughter them) really wanted a ceasefire, they would demand that Hamas release innocent civilians and renounce terrorism.

But they don’t actually want a ceasefire. What they want is to be jackasses.

In 2024, New Yorkers need to stop tolerating those who think the fun of disrupting the system is more important than everyone else’s daily lives.

Like cities nationwide, the Big Apple has been sliding down a slope from tolerating jerks to letting them ruin the joint. Since 2014, the post-Ferguson police-shooting moment has blurred the lines between protesters genuinely concerned with how police respond to lawbreakers and those who think lawbreaking is pretty groovy. The more civil faction (the non-jackasses) has been scared to resist this great stand against authority. So, when the most strident voices in the coalition insisted that minor offenses should not be policed, the non-jackasses indulged them, thinking it a necessary sacrifice, even if, deep down, they valued quality of life and public order.

But low-level offending matters. And while we should work to balance community and law-enforcement responses to bad behavior, pretending that such infractions are no big deal is to let the jackasses win. And winning they are: multiple overlapping policy and political shifts, each diminishing our seriousness about low-level crime, have enabled New York City’s masked, belligerent, solipsistic demonstrators to get away with mayhem.

The Truth About Banned Books James Fishback

https://www.thefp.com/p/banned-books-kelce-2024-pandemic?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_

The left claims that progressive books are being censored in public schools. But my research proves the opposite is true.

Over the last couple years, the media have peddled a narrative of “book bans” sweeping the nation. Book bans (ostensibly by the right) are “eating away at democracy,” according to The Guardian, and are “taking an emotional toll,” warned CNN. The outrage has reached such a fever pitch that free-speech advocacy group PEN America co-filed a lawsuit (along with parents, authors, and publisher Penguin Random House) against Florida’s Escambia County School District and School Board, accusing them of removing books “discussing race, racism, and LGBTQ identities.” Oral arguments in the court case began on January 10.

But the truth is a lot more complicated. 

Last spring, I wrote about the hijacking of high school debate for The Free Press. I detailed how judges disqualify students for advancing conservative arguments that the judges personally disagree with—effectively taking the debate out of high school debate.

Since that article, I’ve spent time meeting with students, parents, teachers, and school board members. Several students complained that their school libraries had become one-sided, offering only books in line with progressive orthodoxy. 

So I decided to investigate just how one-sided things actually are. I surveyed the library catalogs of 35 of the largest public school districts in eight red states and six blue states, representing over 4,600 individual schools. All of these records are publicly available online. (Here are just three online catalogs I searched: Broward County, FL, Austin, TX, and Oklahoma City, OK.) What I discovered isn’t so much a problem of banned books. It’s that kids are often exposed to only one side of the story. 

For example, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which argues that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” is stocked in 42 percent of the U.S. school districts I surveyed.

Meanwhile, only a single school district—Northside Independent School District (ISD) in San Antonio, Texas—offers students Woke Racism by John McWhorter, a book that challenges the borderline religious “anti-racist” ideas advanced by Kendi.

John Sailer: The DEI Rollback Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices are still deeply entrenched at our institutions—but the retrenchment is well under way. By John Sailer

https://www.thefp.com/p/john-sailer-the-dei-rollback

When he took office in 2021, Utah governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, made advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” a key priority. He appointed a high-level diversity officer to his administration. His senior leadership was put through a “21-Day Equity Challenge,” which instructed them in microaggressions and antiracism.

The universities were on board. Utah State’s annual diversity symposium featured talks such as “Decentering Whiteness.” The university also required DEI statements from applicants to the faculty, explaining how they infused diversity and equity—a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of “marginalization”—into their work. Even for positions in fields such as insect ecology and lithospheric evolution. 

Then, in December, Cox announced a different priority: reversing the excesses of DEI. At a press conference he said, “We’re using identitarianism to force people into boxes, and into victimhood, and I just don’t think that’s helpful at all. In fact, I think it’s harmful.” So harmful that he announced his intention to bar the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring, condemning the practice as “bordering on evil.”

Spencer Cox is not alone. After what appeared to be an inexorable rise of the DEI bureaucracy through government, higher education, and business for the past few years, many now feel like Cox—and are taking action. Legislators have proposed and passed laws curtailing DEI practices. Businesses have trimmed their DEI positions. Some universities have voluntarily ditched mandatory diversity statements. DEI is still deeply entrenched at our institutions—but retrenchment is well under way.

The long war of strategy in the Middle East by David Wurmser

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/the-long-war-of-strategy-in-the-middle-east/

The United States and Israel disagree about who will rule Gaza in the “day after” scenario. The United States seeks to install a refurbished Palestinian Authority and proceed happily toward a two-state solution. Israel’s “day after” plan is unclear and may not yet even have crystallized. It is difficult, thus, to comment on Israel’s approach, but one thing is certain: the plan to rehabilitate the Palestinian Authority as a government will fail.  And neither for the commonly understood reasons of its unpopularity and incompetence born of corruption nor for its inability to rise above its terror pedigree. It is because the very idea of the Palestinian Authority as a solution to the Hamas challenge is based on concepts divorced from a Middle Eastern context.

To understand the problem with our approach, we must begin with our bafflement over why deterrence failed and Hamas even started this war.  Moreover, why does Hamas still think it is winning? Why did it invite its own destruction and why does it not see it as its own destruction?

One of the greatest barriers Westerners have in understanding the region is our deep appreciation for structures and words as institutions.  In the West, institutions have a life of their own, and the possessors of office – a tangible concept in the West – are merely trustees.  A leader or office-holder is only a steward of a trust whose job is to protect the interests of the trust. It is not about him; he will be judged entirely on whether he strengthened or damaged the stature and well-being of the institution during his stewardship. As Westerners we place great faith in the solidity of structures and words as institutions.

But such solidity does not exist in the Middle East. Institutions are extensions of personal relationships. They lack a life of their own. Even on issues of succession in government, arrangements perish with the ruler.  When the founding prophet of Islam, Muhammad, died, the tribes met in Mecca to name a replacement, whom they did – Abu Bakr in 632 AD.  And yet, despite the “office” of leader’s having passed to Abu Bakr, he was promptly confronted with challenges, even war, by many of those who ostensibly supported him. The pledged unity of the various factions and tribes to Muhammad and the community of Islam melted away.

The Hysterical Style in American Politics Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-hysterical-style-in-american-politics/

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism.

But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.

Or, in the immortal words of Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

The 2008 economic emergency crested on September 7, with the near collapse of the home mortgage industry.

Obama took office on January 20, 2009, more than four months after the meltdown. In that interim, the officials had finally restored financial confidence and plotted a course of economic recovery.

No matter. The Obama administration never stopped hyping the financial meltdown as if it had just occurred. That way, it rammed through Obamacare, massive deficit spending, and the vast expansion of the federal government. All that stymied economic growth and recovery for years.

In 2016, Donald Trump was declared Hitler-like and an existential threat to democracy.

Amid this derangement syndrome, any means necessary to stop him were justified: the Russian collusion hoax, impeachment over a phone call, or the Hunter laptop disinformation farce.

Eventually, the left sought to normalize the once unthinkable: removing the leading presidential candidate from state ballots and indicting him in state and local courts.

Biden Administration’s ‘Pathway’ to a Palestinian Terror State by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20317/biden-administration-palestinian-terror-state

By continuing to obsessively stick to the creation of a Palestinian state, the Biden administration is actually sending a message to Iran and its terror proxies that terrorism pays – that if they inflict more pain and casualties on Israel, the Americans will reward them with a state of their own next to Israel to facilitate their mission of continuing their Jihadist murder spree against Jews and finally obliterate Israel.

The poll further showed that if presidential elections were held today, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would receive 78% of the vote, as opposed to only 16% for Abbas.

The poll found that 64% of the Palestinians oppose the idea of a two-state solution, while 53% support a return to the “armed struggle” against Israel.

All polls conducted by the same center have consistently shown that a majority of the Palestinians believe that Hamas is more deserving of representing them than the PA. This means that if and when a Palestinian state is established, as the Biden administration is hoping, it will be ruled by Hamas and its masters in Iran… overlooking the few miles from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport.

The idea that creating another Arab state alongside Israel would “isolate” or “marginalize” Iran and its proxies is as wrong as it is dangerous. In reality, the establishment of a Palestinian state on any part of the West Bank or Gaza Strip would incentivize Iran and its clients to escalate their Jihad against Israel: it would send them the message that the more Jews you murder, the more land you get.

[T]his conflict is not about a settlement or a checkpoint or Jerusalem, but about Israel’s right to exist in any form in the Middle East. What Blinken and the Biden administration seem unable to grasp is that there are still too many people among the Palestinians, and many other Arabs and Muslims, who have yet to come to terms with the right of a nation that is not Islamic to remain in its home in the Middle East.

Blinken is suggesting not a pathway to peace, but a prize to Hamas and the Palestinians for committing genocide.

Argentina’s New President, Javier Milei, Stuns Davos With Attack on Secret ‘Socialist’ Agenda of Moneyed Western Elites

https://www.nysun.com/article/argentinas-feisty-president-javier-milei-stuns-davos-with-attack-on-secret-socialist-agenda-of-moneyed-western-elites?lctg=1

Just when you thought it was safe to write off Davos as irremediably dull — think Antony Blinken with a side order of Tom Friedman — along comes the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” president of Argentina, Javier Milei, to shake up the Swiss town with a one-two punch to what he perceives to be the “socialist agenda” of various elites.

The tirade came in the form of a half-hour long speech to a full house of policy wonks and boldfaced names in the business world who were advised by Mr. Milei to choose freedom over socialist-style state control, “dammit.”

With a late-career Elvis-style haircut that makes Boris Johnson’s unruly locks look tame, and his dim view of taxes — Jesus didn’t pay them, he says — Mr. Milei had all of Davos buzzing even before he touched down in Switzerland on Tuesday. 

His mission, he said before departing Argentina, was to “plant the idea of ​​freedom in a forum polluted by the socialist 2030 agenda.” He elaborated on that to a packed conference room Wednesday afternoon, declaring that “socialism is an impoverishing phenomenon and a failure whenever it has been attempted.”

Antisemitism From the Left “I can’t believe this is happening in our country today.”by Betsy McCaughey

https://www.frontpagemag.com/antisemitism-from-the-left/

Jews are feeling increasingly afraid and unwelcome. Last week, girls on the basketball team of a Jewish private school in suburban Hartsdale, New York, were jabbed and hit with antisemitic slurs by players from Yonkers’ Roosevelt High School. “I support Hamas, you f—-ing Jew,” a Roosevelt player snarled. The game had to be called off in the third quarter, and the Jewish girls needed school security to help them leave.

Antisemitic incidents were already on the rise in 2021 and 2022. Now they are up nearly 400% year over year since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explains, “I am not talking about, you know, stores producing IDF T-shirts. I’m talking about a coffee shop on Long Island, an ice cream parlor in the Bay Area, a restaurant in Chicago.” It reminds him of his grandparents’ barbershop, which was vandalized by the Nazis in Germany. “I can’t believe this is happening in our country today.”

Believe it.

The mainstream media choose to downplay it and the Democratic Party is, at best, divided. Antisemitism has often come from the Right, but it appears now to be coming from the Left.

When the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania caused outrage by saying at a congressional hearing in December that calls for Jewish genocide don’t necessarily violate campus policy — “it depends on the context” — Democrats’ reactions were mixed.

First Plagiarism, Now Lying: What’s Happening to America’s Universities? Those who claim to be “marginalized” have all the power – and use it ruthlessly. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/first-plagiarism-now-lying-whats-happening-to-americas-universities/

Here’s another good reason not to plunk down $126,584 (that’s the total for four years of tuition unless it goes up between now and 2027) to send your kid to Rutgers. Long considered to be one of America’s premier universities, the beloved alma mater of Mr. Magoo is now a sinkhole of woke indoctrination, with academic standards sinking lower than Old Joe Biden’s ethics. A professor at Rutgers Law School has lied openly in an academic paper and has refused to back down, knowing that she will face no consequences from an administration that is as corrupt and compromised as she is.

In this, of course, Rutgers is like virtually every other university in America today. First, there was the remarkable public self-immolation of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania during a congressional hearing; then Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign after her repeated plagiarism was revealed, although she claimed that her resignation was due to “personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” and many in the academic establishment and elsewhere bought her nonsense.

These incidents, however, were just the latest and highest-profile manifestations of an intellectual and spiritual rot that is everywhere. One small example of it came in a recent pseudo-scholarly study from Rutgers University Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights, entitled “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes In the Palestine–Israel Discourse.”

This “study” is 65 pages of Marxist agitprop, woke psychobabble, and pure fantasy, all thrown together in a thick propaganda stew that’s designed to show “how race and racism infect foreign policy and the treatment of minority communities who espouse unpopular views or dissent from the political orthodoxy, including the defense of human rights for all.” If the authors of this twaddle, Mitchell Plitnick, President of ReThinking Foreign Policy, and Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School, were remotely honest, they would say that “race and racism” affect the treatment of minority communities by getting them coddled, treated with kid gloves, and accorded all manner of special perks.

Biden Has ‘Delivered For The American People’ All Right, And They Want A Refund

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/18/biden-has-delivered-for-the-american-people-all-right-and-they-want-a-refund/

Rep. James Clyburn, who is a co-chairman of Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, recently tried to explain the president’s predicament by saying that he’s “delivered for the American people in such a way that nobody seems to grasp.”

As campaign slogans go, that’s not exactly “Morning in America.” But the truth is that everybody grasps what Biden has delivered. It’s what he’s delivered that they don’t like.

Clyburn, talking on MSNBC, said the public just needs to “look at the facts and stop listening to all of this tweeting and stuff that’s going on out there that’s not good for the American people.”

We took the South Carolina Democrat’s word for it, and here’s what we found that Biden has delivered, at home and abroad.

The cost of living has skyrocketed. Prices have climbed by almost 17% since Biden took office three years ago. Food prices are up 20%. Gasoline is up 26%. Electricity up 24%. Car insurance up 30%.

Real wages are down. Because wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, even workers who’ve been getting raises have been falling behind.

Poverty is up. Last fall, the Census Bureau pegged the poverty rate in 2022 at 12.4%, up from 7.8% in 2021.

The national debt has exploded. Gross federal debt now tops $34 trillion, which is $6 trillion higher than when Biden got the keys to the White House.

Deficits are on the rise. As we reported here last week, deficits in the current fiscal year are running 21% higher than they were last year, setting the stage for a $2 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2024 – nearly double what it was in 2022.

Illegals are flooding across the border. December set a new record for illegal border crossings, bringing the total to 6.8 million under Biden’s open-border policies. Even Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admits that most of them are simply released into the country. These numbers, mind you, don’t count the “gotaways” – the criminals, cartel members, terrorists, and other undesirables who avoided border patrol agents.

Attacks on the U.S. are up. America is coming under increasing attack since Biden took office. Iranian-backed proxies have attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria at least 150 times, most of them since Tehran-supported Hamas terrorists invaded Israel.