ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Donald Trump you never see By Gamaliel Isaac

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/the_donald_trump_you_never_see.html

On October 9, the renowned lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz posted a video on his show, The Dershow, titled “Is Harris winning or is Trump losing?”  In it, he argued that the polls are beginning to trend in favor of Harris.  Professor Dershowitz asked:

What is the reason for that?  Is it that Harris is winning more voters, or Trump is losing more voters?

Professor Dershowitz said that he doesn’t think the election is about policy as much as it is about personality.  He said,

A lot of people I know are saying, “Look, I much prefer Trump’s foreign policy, and economic policy, but I just can’t bring myself to vote for the guy … because he did this or said that.”

Trump does say and do things that turn people off.  In addition, when he says things that are perfectly okay, the left wing, the media, and his political opposition twist what he says to mean something terrible and then claim he said it.  A classic example of that is when Trump said that there were “some very fine people on both sides,” referring to a clash in Charlottesville between people who wanted to remove the statue of General Lee and people who wanted to protect the statue.  Malevolent distortions of what Trump said about that clash never end.  Headlines include “Trump again blames both sides for violence at white supremacist rally in Charlottesville” (Politico), “Why Can’t Trump Just Condemn Nazis?” (The Atlantic), “Trump revives his controversial claim equating white supremacists and anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville clashes” (The LA Times), etc.  The press leaves out Trump’s clarification, which he made in the same press conference:

And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white Nationalists. They should be condemned totally.

The left wants us to think that Trump makes Nazi-like statements and that he is a right-wing antisemitic extremist who is against freedom and democracy.  Leftists are successful in persuading people.  At one point, they even convinced J.D. Vance, Trump’s current running mate, that Trump is like Hitler.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Department of Education Grants Found to Support Classes Taught by Radical Anti-Israel Professors Haley Strack

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/department-of-education-grants-found-to-support-classes-taught-by-radical-anti-israel-professors/

The Department of Education has granted millions of dollars in funding to university programs that tout anti-Israel professors, a new report from Open the Books revealed on Tuesday.

More than $22 million has been allocated to support at least a dozen foreign studies programs at top universities that feature anti-Israel staff members. The DOE awards universities Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants “to assist graduate students in foreign language and either international studies or area studies,” the department says on its website, which Open the Books found have been used to support the work of multiple anti-Israel faculty members.

Columbia University’s Middle East program received $2.8 million in FLAS grants between the years 2020–24, Open the Books reported, which it secured by way of grant applications that spotlighted the work of Joseph Massad, among others. A professor in the school’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) Department, Massad, called Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel “a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” and has spoken before at Columbia on “Zionism and Jewish Supremacy.” On a 2018 FLAS grant application, Columbia listed Massad as a faculty member who is “strong on contemporary politics, with tremendous geographic range” and said that lauded his work teaching “courses that focus on the modern history, gender, political economy, international relations, politics and culture of the region.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Tren de Aragua Gang Members Terrorizing Times Square By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/15/tren-de-aragua-gang-members-terrorizing-times-square/

The vicious migrant gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) has been recruiting increasingly younger members to engage in coordinated crimes and attacks in Times Square, in the heart of New York City.

As reported by the New York Post, the ring consists of at nearly two dozen illegal aliens, with some as young as 11 years old so that they appear less threatening at a first glance. The gang coordinates their efforts to commit various crimes such as snatching purses and holding civilians at gunpoint, primarily targeting New York residents and tourists.

But due to their age, their migrant status, and New York’s infamously soft criminal justice laws, the culprits have managed to largely avoid prison.

“You have individuals that are brazen,” said Detective Bureau Assistant Chief Jason Savino. “We know they have access to guns, evident by the fact that they’ve done gunpoint robberies and they’ve been brazen enough to showcase pistols in and around their social media.”

“This is the first formulated group that we found where this group of about 20 individuals that, in pack format, hang out every day, they post on social media, they boast about their crew,” Savino continued. “You see little pockets in and around Times Square and in and around the shelters.”

The gang calls themselves the “Los Diablos de la 42,” which translates to “Little Devils of 42nd Street.” The gang of about 21 members has been accused of over 50 different crimes, despite not one member being arrested or charged.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Steven Malanga Hot Rod Hell States and cities battle the latest social media-fueled lawlessness: street takeovers.

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/law-enforcement-cracks-down-on-street-takeovers

Rising social disorder in a post-Covid, defund-the-police America has forced cities and states to address new kinds of criminal outbreaks—from mass retail theft to squatting. Authorities have increasingly formed special police and prosecution units and toughened penalties in places as varied as New York City, Tampa, and Las Vegas to deal with these eruptions. Now added to the growing ranks of policing challenges is the latest lawless craze: street takeovers. In recent months, authorities in Texas, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Ohio, to name just a few places, have had to reorganize their increasingly undermanned police resources to confront these social media-fueled mass street demonstrations, which threaten other drivers and pedestrians and occasionally metamorphose into violent looting mobs. Localities are also rushing through new legislation aimed at discouraging mass vehicle gatherings. It’s the latest struggle to seize back streets that communities yielded to the lawless in the past few years.

While drag racing and biker rallies on local streets are nothing new, something larger and more dangerous formed during the tail end of Covid. The trend began when hot rodders took advantage of streets largely empty because of lockdowns to burn rubber, race against one another, or perform dangerous maneuvers like “doughnuts.” Sometimes, a group of drivers would assemble and ride in unison slowly down a street, effectively taking it over. Videos of these exhibitions on social media garnered huge audiences, and soon people were using Twitter and Instagram to advertise what became known as street takeovers. The events grew in number and intensity even as roads got busier once Covid restrictions faded.

These mass demonstrations emerged as police departments were being weakened by budget cuts and recruiting problems in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020. As a result, police were often overwhelmed and forced merely to observe these giant gatherings. In the Connecticut town of Milford, a single cop in a police car watched as a four-mile line of cars, motorcycles, and all-terrain vehicles passed by. Some of the cyclists popped wheelies in front of the cop, while others crossed the median and drove on the wrong side of the road to taunt him. In nearby Tolland, residents were outraged when state police stood by and allowed participants in a street takeover to attack a couple in a car who tried to maneuver around the congestion—stomping on the vehicle and smashing it until they totaled the car.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Richard T. Bosshardt Lipstick on a Pig Recognizing that DEI has acquired a toxic reputation, the American College of Surgeons tries to rebrand it—while retaining its core premises.

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/lipstick-on-a-pig

The American College of Surgeons is trying to expunge the term DEI from antiracism and critical race theory initiatives. An attempted rebranding was inevitable, given how rapidly the term and its associated programs have fallen out of favor. Universities, corporations, and institutions of all kinds are eagerly rechristening, if not dismantling, their DEI departments and laying off their DEI administrators.

The new name of the game is “Inclusive Excellence.” Like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” it has a nice ring to it and even seems to signal a return to a focus on merit. This is not the case. Search the ACS website for the Office of Diversity, and you’ll be redirected to the Office of Inclusive Excellence. The ACS has renamed its DEI Toolkit, introduced in December 2023, the ACS Inclusive Excellence Resource and Implementation Toolkit.

A perusal of the materials reveals that little if anything has changed in the program’s content and focus. It continues to promote the discredited Implicit Association Test as a measure of one’s implicit bias. It still claims that achieving proportionate representation of identity groups somehow makes organizations better. It adopts the same underlying DEI premise: that disparities of representation always indicate discrimination.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Kamala’s ‘Charm’ Blitzkrieg Fails Miserably Nowhere to hide – as election time closes in. by Derek Hunter

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamalas-charm-blitzkrieg-fails-miserably/

There are some people so incompetent that they could blow a tap-in putt. “Hand me the wedge,” they say as they overlook a 2-inch gap. You can’t help these people, even though they are likely the most in need of saving anyone, because you can’t save people from themselves. This, I suspect, is why the handlers of Kamala Harris have chosen to run the campaign they have.

Hiding is the only defense against incompetence. The only problem is that no matter where you hide, there you are. A person can escape a lot, themselves is not one of them.

After two months of hiding not working, as the public notices the Democratic Party’s nominees for president and vice president haven’t really done much talking beyond scripted, vapid stump speeches, the Harris/Walz campaign has decided to launch a “charm offensive.” They decided to let their candidates talk in what can only be described as either uber-friendly or softly-scripted interviews with supporters…and they still did horribly.

You can tell a lot about the amount of faith a campaign has in its candidates by the people they’re willing to talk to. For example, Donald Trump will do pretty anything and to almost anyone, unless they’ve mistreated him in the past.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, on the other hand, would need their own family members screened and topics agreed to before they’d sit down for breakfast with them. (In Kamala’s case you might be able to understand it, as news reports indicated her husband allegedly has no problem smacking a woman around if she displeases him.)

Aside from a 3 on a 1 to 10 scale of toughness interview with 60 Minutes, Democrats could not have played it safer than they have. Howard Stern has fully transitioned into everything he mocked in order to become famous in the first place, with whatever testicles he had left actually ascending back into his body, seemingly all the way into his throat.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

America’s Europeanizing Antisemitism American leftists are going the suicidal way of Europe. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-europeanizing-antisemitism/

America’s decline was a generation behind Europe. Now we’re where Europe used to be.

Why are Hamas rioters running around major cities? American cities are now also populated by unemployed grad students who alternate between sitting in cafes and throwing firebombs at police in their hip districts and mobs of foreign migrants squatting entire neighborhoods. The native working class is sinking into despair and drug abuse in the rural and industrial hinterlands even as those areas are being overrun by third worlders who dominate the local economies.

The older generation still remembers a glorious past while the younger generation never knew it. It exists in a world of transnational pop songs and has been taught that nationalism is the greatest evil. Military service and religious belief have become fringe attitudes to deplore.

An insecure middle class despairing of economic success has embraced socialism along with every cultural leftist fetish, and is alternately enthused and terrified of what it has unleashed. Every new degeneracy is added to the dogma of the ‘In This House’ lawn sign that defines what they have left behind and what they are headed toward. The latest addition is Hamas.

Europeanization has brought with it the cringing antisemitism that used to baffle Americans when they saw it in London, Paris and Berlin. Why did European elites celebrate ‘Palestinian’ terrorism? How could formerly great nations live in terror of what some Imam in the European version of Dearborn, Michigan thought about Israel, Mohammed cartoons or the next election?

Now we know.

The elimination of Jews from public life that began among European elites after 9/11 has come to America. It’s playing out in much the same way with furious denunciations of Israel and the normalization of Hamas. American college students in New York or LA chanting for Islamic terrorists are acting much the way their counterparts in London were doing 25 years ago.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Junk Science is being used to Prop up DEI It’s even worse than I thought Eric Kaufmann

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://erickaufmann.substack.com/p/junk-science-is-being-used-to-prop

Don’t get fooled again by experts claiming that DEI rests on scientific evidence.

What follows is an updated and expanded version of the short piece I published at Unherd four days ago. Whereas I had thought the authors of a paper claiming discrimination against minority scholars in academia were only guilty of burying their key findings while touting weak results, it now looks like their results are garbage: a result of sloppiness, mendacity, or both. This tells us a great deal about the knowledge production system in the social sciences, and how it systematically skews what experts consider to be the ‘truth’ and ‘settled science’.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is on the ropes these days. This is a big problem for institutions, such as most elite universities or Science magazine, that have invested deeply in this belief system. One way to rescue the enterprise is to tout new scientific results that buttress the claim that minorities and women are discriminated against in academia. Ergo the need for affirmative action.

Now the woke popular science magazine Science is trumpeting a new academic paper in the equally woke Nature Human Behaviour as a riposte to the naysayers. ‘Racial bias can taint the academic tenure process,’ screams the headline.

The paper’s authors claim Black and Hispanic academics with the same track record are discriminated against when they come up for tenure and promotion. But their data, if anything, points to anti-White/Asian bias, propping up weak results while covering up inconvenient but powerful findings.

The authors briefly admit that disadvantaged minorities are advantaged over Whites and Asians when it comes to being promoted to full professor. But, at an earlier career stage, when moving from a relatively insecure non-tenured professorship to a secure tenured professorship, they are discriminated against. This helps explain minority underrepresentation in academia.

I was curious so I downloaded and crunched their data.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

William Jefferson Clinton, Election Denier What in the world does the 42nd president mean by the suggestion that the election will come down to whether we can get an honest vote count?

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/william-jefferson-clinton-election-denier?lctg=1474934676&recognized_email=

Bill Clinton, election denier? That’s the prospect heaving into view now that the 42nd president is raising doubts about the legitimacy of the vote tallies on November 5. What he said is that he’s wondering “whether we can get an honest, open count.” With the presidential contest in a “dead heat,” as NBC News puts it, Mr. Clinton’s remarks suggest an emerging Democratic strategy if the votes don’t go their way: Challenge the integrity of the balloting.

On the hustings in Georgia for Vice President Harris, Mr. Clinton mused that “what will decide the outcome,” NBC reported, is “who wants it bad enough.” A Clinton aide clarified that “various reports of threats and intimidation against election officials” prompted the remarks. Yet Mr. Clinton’s comments remind that while President Trump is often excoriated for his refusal to accept the outcome in 2020, the Democrats are better on this head.

Feature, say, Secretary Clinton and other members of her party who, after Trump’s win in 2016, insinuated that Russian meddling in the race had made him an “illegitimate president.” Mrs. Clinton, after losing, pointed to “the many varying tactics” deployed during the 2016 campaign, “from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories” as among “just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”

Then again, too, what about the Democrats who doubted the fairness of the 2000 and 2004 elections won by President George W. Bush?

MEDIA Comments turned off

Americans Are Suffering From ‘Crisis in Confidence’ in Major Institutions, Especially the Press: Gallup Polling The press is the least trusted group of ten major institutions — including local and state governments and the judicial branch.Maggie Hroncich

Posted By on October 16th, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/americans-are-suffering-from-crisis-in-confidence-in-major-institutions-especially-the-press-gallup-polling?

The percentage of Americans who trust the press — including television, radio, and newspapers — has fallen to a historic low, new Gallup polling indicates.

With 36 percent of Americans saying they don’t trust the press to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly” compared to only 31 percent who trust it a fair amount or a great deal, those who distrust the news outnumber those who trust it for the third year in a row.

In addition to the 36 percent of American adults who said they have no trust in the press, an additional 33 percent said they had “not very much” confidence in it. Trust has plummeted deeply since Gallup first started tracking the issue in the 1970s, when trust in news institutions was ranging between 68 and 72 percent. 

Confidence levels had a slight rebound after the 2016 election but spiraled downwards in 2019 and in the years since. The polling also indicates a deep difference in trust levels along partisan lines — 54 percent of Democrats have at least a fair amount of trust in the news, compared to 27 percent of independents and a mere 12 percent of Republicans. 

The press is also the “least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process,” Gallup says. A majority of Americans, or 67 percent, expressed trust in their own local governments to handle local issues, and 55 percent trust their state governments to handle state problems. When it comes to making decisions about issues facing the country, 54 percent of American adults trust the “American people as a whole.” 

Trust in the federal government to handle international and domestic issues also outweighs trust in the press, and more Americans trust the judicial branch and the executive branch more than they trust news institutions, the polling showed.