ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Anti-Semitic Academia Finally Getting Punched in the Wallet By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/10/26/anti-semitic-academia-finally-getting-punched-in-the-wallet-n1737961

Ever since the terrorist murderers in Hamas attacked Israel almost three weeks ago, we’ve been witnessing the disgusting spectacle of American college students very vocally condemning Israel, some of which the esteemed VodkaPundit recently chronicled.

For being attacked.

Yes, parents, this is what a small fortune gets you when you send your kids off to have their minds polluted by the leftist filth that controls Academia.

These kids didn’t come out of the womb being virulently anti-Semitic, they had to be conditioned. To be sure, the American public education indoctrination mill helped get them there, but it’s the lunatics in Academia’s ivory towers who are responsible for the finished product. As I said in a recent podcast, the students are only working with the facts that their professors presented to them.

A handful of college presidents and boards of regents have issued statements condemning anti-Semitism and Hamas, but that can all be filed under “Too Little, Too Late.” The damage to young minds has already been done.

Wholesale changes in American public education and academia are long past overdue, but it’s been considered sacrilege — mostly by the left — to disparage the sainted teachers or institutions of higher learning. Eyes are being opened now, however. The corrupt agenda of the teachers’ unions that run K-12 public schools was revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and got parents involved in curricula decisions in great numbers.

The behavior of the rabidly pro-Palestinian/Hamas students at many elite universities has shocked a lot of people who aren’t online and consuming news for most of their waking hours.

There is, of course, BIG money in academia. It takes a lot to keep the hegemonic brain-washing apparatus humming. Obviously, the best way to fight it is to hit them where it hurts the most — in the bank accounts.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

October 7 Coming to America? Don’t fool yourself. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/october-7-coming-to-america/

During the last 20 years I’ve written extensively about two things. One is the dangerous rise of Islam in the West. The other is the ideological destruction of the American academy. The aftermath of the Hamas atrocities of October 7 has brought both of these concerns to the fore. In the wake of the most horrific attack on Jews since the Holocaust, there were massive rallies across the country in sympathy with the terrorist perpetrators, and the participants in these demonstrations belonged largely to two groups: (1) college students and (2) Muslims.

If the jihadist butchery of October 7 was monstrous, the spectacle of huge crowds applauding it was appalling. It shocked many people. It shouldn’t have. Many of us have spent years writing endlessly about the ugliness of Islamic ideology – notably the murderous hatred of Jews that is enshrined in the Koran, taught in the madrassas, and preached in the mosques – only to feel that our words were falling on deaf ears. Similarly, many of us have been writing for a long time about the far-left professors, especially at our so-called elite colleges, who teach their students that America, the West, Christians, Jews, and white people are always the oppressors and aggressors and that people of color, especially Muslims, are always victims. The public displays of solidarity with Hamas are at once a dramatic illustration of both of these phenomena and the strongest argument yet for major action on both of these fronts.

First, something drastic needs to be done about American higher education. The ideological depredation wrought by far-left faculty and administrators at private colleges needs to be addressed by responsible-minded trustees, alumni, and donors. Speaking of donors, something needs to be done about them, as well: as Eli Lake reported on October 25, not a few U.S. colleges have accepted fortunes from Muslim countries and have built whole campuses in those countries – with the syllabi tailored, of course, to local requirements. That repulsive intellectual compromise needs to be quashed. Then there’s the matter of administrative bloat: as the College Fix website noted on October 24, Harvard has over 1.3 administrators per student. Most of these people are superfluous at best and mischief-makers at worst – DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) bureaucrats who strive to protect students from “microaggression” but who shrug indifferently at cries of “kill the Jews.”

As for public universities, responsible state and municipal leaders could do worse than to emulate Florida Governor Ron de Santis, who appointed anti-ideology crusader Christopher Rufo as a trustee at Sarasota’s New College and – in an October 24 order – banned chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, a student organization that provides support to Hamas, from Sunshine State campuses.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Fred Bauer Reaping the Whirlwind The anti-Semitism now on display on college campuses has one of its origins in the erosion of public order during the summer 2020 “racial reckoning.”

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitism-at-the-cooper-union

Last night, a small cluster of Jewish students barricaded themselves in the library of Cooper Union, while a crowd outside banged on the doors chanting: “Free Palestine.”

Scenes like this have become familiar on college campuses. Radical activists have spent years devising strategies to drown out and, in some cases, physically threaten undesirable voices. In March 2017, masked activists at Middlebury College mobbed the social scientist Charles Murray, chasing him and others into a car. They shoved and pulled the hair of the faculty moderator for the event (who said that she disagreed with Murray about many issues). These tactics of revolutionary exception are now being used to target Jewish people on campuses and in cities across the United States.

The ugly displays of anti-Semitism that have erupted across the United States over the past month are at once the extension of the racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020 and a profound challenge to the legitimacy of this supposed reckoning. One of the reckoning’s premises was that the urgency of injustice demanded the suspension of civic order and the norms of a liberal society. Rioters were thus permitted to torch public buildings, loot businesses, and tear down statues of “problematic” figures from the past. When the New York Times ran an op-ed by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to help put down violent riots, the newsroom dissolved into a struggle session that ended in the departure of multiple staffers, including editorial page editor James Bennet. In workplaces across the United States at that time, an inopportune comment on Zoom could mean defenestration. For defenders of the reckoning, confronting the history of racism demanded such consequences.

Despite years of warnings about the importance of democratic norms and liberal democracy, the American establishment mostly blessed these efforts. Foundations poured hundreds of millions of dollars into identity-politics activist groups. Major public institutions adopted the creed of the reckoning. Even mild criticisms of ideological purges—such as the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”—were treated as reactionary screeds. Terrified of right-populism, part of the political establishment might have seen the reckoning as a weapon to be used against Donald Trump-supporting “deplorables”; or maybe anti-Trump coalitional politics simply demanded silence in the face of these excesses.

Now the promissory note of the reckoning has come due. In habituating people to the idea that righteousness justifies the abrogation of individual dignity and dismissal of political pluralism, the reckoning taught lessons deeply at odds with the functioning of American democracy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Johnson begins House speakership with focus on debt, inflation, ‘border catastrophe’ as top issues By Nicholas Ballasy

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/johnson-begins-house-speakership-focus-debt-inflation-and-border-catastrophe#google_vignette

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., the newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives kicked off his leadership role on Wednesday with a commitment to establish a fiscal commission dedicated to rolling back excessive government spending as a way to reduce inflation. He also called on the Senate and White House to stop ignoring the “catastrophe” at the southern border.

Johnson described the nation’s rising $33 trillion national debt as the greatest threat to national security and connected it to the level of inflation that America’s families have been grappling with the last few years.

“The greatest threat to our national security is our nation’s debt and while we’ve been sitting in this room – that’s right – the debt has crossed almost $33.6 trillion and in time it’s going to take me to deliver this speech, we will go up $20 million in debt. It’s unsustainable,” Johnson said on the House floor to a standing ovation from Republicans and a handful of Democrats seated in the chamber.

“We have to get the country back on track. We know this isn’t going to be an easy task and tough decisions will have to be made but the consequences if we don’t act now are unbearable. We have a duty to the American people to explain this to them so they understand it well and we’re going to establish a bipartisan debt commission to begin working on this crisis immediately,” he added after formally taking the gavel.

At this point, Congress has until Nov. 17 to pass a federal budget to avoid a government shutdown. The White House and congressional leaders will soon be negotiating on an agreed upon level of federal spending, which will be the first major test of Johnson’s speakership.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a member of the House Budget Committee, told Just the News on Wednesday that the GOP-led House might pass a temporary spending bill or “Continuing Resolution” through January.

“I don’t like CRs. I definitely don’t like omnibuses being crammed, you know, during the Thanksgiving or the Christmas holidays has got to end,” he said. “But he’ll [Johnson] have some leeway on that. He’s talking about January and we’ll see what the overall numbers look like and then go from there.”

The House has been working on passing single subject appropriations bills to fund each cabinet agency separately, which conservatives argue is a way to reduce wasteful spending. The House lost time in that process given that votes were frozen while the GOP conference searched for a speaker after McCarthy’s ousting. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

California university offers extra credit for marching against Israel By Mindy Rubenstein, World Israel News

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://worldisraelnews.com/california-university-offers-extra-credit-for-marching-against-israel

Controversy erupted when a teacher at UC Berkeley offered her students extra credit for participating in anti-Israel activities in support of terrorist-run Gaza.

The University of California Berkeley is under fire after the school approved an instructor’s plan to offer extra credit to students who participate in an anti-Israel march or watch an anti-Israel documentary.

Graduate student Victoria Huynh, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, sent an email to students enrolled in her course, “Asian American Communities and Race Relations,” about the anti-Israel extra-credit options.

The email promoted an event called the “National walkout against genocide, settler-colonialism, and the siege of Gaza,” and informed students that they had the option to participate in the national student walkout or watch a short documentary on Palestine and contact their local California representatives.

This participation would count as either a field trip or an extra five points in the field trip category of their course grade.

After students posted a screenshot of the assignment on social media, the school faced heavy backlash, including with a diversity and inclusion organization that Huynh had previously worked for, Model Expand.

The post about the assignment received more than 1.9 million views in less than a day.

UC Berkeley received extensive criticism on social media, with concerns raised about the safety of Jewish students on campus and the broader implications of such actions by a teacher.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Michael Oren: A War Against the Jews Hatred of Israel cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. By Michael Oren

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/this-isnt-a-war-against-israel?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ” —The Hamas Charter

“The conventional war of conquest was to be waged parallel to, and was also to camouflage, the ideological war against the Jews.” —Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933–1945

It wasn’t the rallies with “Keep the World Clean” posters and chants of “gas the Jews.” Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240 percent), the United States (nearly 400 percent), and London (1,353 percent) convinced me.

It was, rather, one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. A realization that they, like me, surely tried to push out of their minds until the reality became unmistakeable. 

This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews. 

The insight began with the international media’s coverage of the conflict. Again, it wasn’t the press’s insistence on calling mass murderers “militants” or citing Hamas and its “Health Ministry” as a reliable source. For close to fifty years—as a student activist, a diplomat, a soldier, a government and military spokesman, and above all, as a historian—I’ve grappled with the media’s bias against Israel. I’ve long known that the terrorists are “militants” solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible. 

Instead, it was the media’s predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy. 

ELECTIONS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Democrats are pushing work authorization for migrants — so they can vote By Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/10/24/opinion/democrats-are-pushing-work-authorization-for-migrants-so-they-can-vote/

If you think offering migrants luxury hotel rooms, free meals, laundry service, transportation, health care and immigration lawyers is excessive, just wait until they can vote.

Democrats are pushing to give noncitizens the franchise in local elections in New York City, Boston and other municipalities, as well as statewide in Connecticut.

The number of migrants pouring across the southern border has hit a record high, according to data released Saturday.

Illegal crossings soared 21% over the previous month.

On a yearly basis, the figure reached 2.48 million.

Democrats may feign shock and distress. 

Don’t be fooled. 

Dems see these newcomers as their guarantee of a permanent voting majority in local elections. 

Not years from now, after the newcomers become citizens.

Right now.

Mayor Eric Adams’ rhetoric is typical. 

He warns that the overwhelming number of migrants arriving — 16,000 to 17,000 a month — will “destroy the city,” but he’s also leading the legal effort to turn migrants into voters.

Adams and other New York Democrats pushed President Joe Biden to expedite work authorizations for them.

They said it’s about making migrants self-sufficient. Maybe, but Dems have another powerful motive.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Has EV Boom Jumped The Shark?

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/27/has-ev-boom-jumped-the-shark/

Many people have climbed aboard the electric-vehicle bandwagon, lured by promises of pristine air and cheap, easy-to-use electricity that make EVs seem inevitable. But now, after years of spending billions on subsidies and shaming people into buying into our inevitable all-electric future, some are slamming on the brakes — surprisingly, including many of the biggest companies in the industry.

The global companies, recipients of massive subsidies to support fossil-fuel abolition, are backing away from their support.

General Motors, faced with a strike, just abandoned its EV strategy,  while the AutoBlog points out that Mercedes “is finding that customers aren’t as excited about new EVs as it is.”

Elon Musk’s Tesla lost an estimated $28 billion in value after reporting what were called “disastrous third-quarter earnings.” Ford, faced with dramatically slowing sales, just announced it will delay $12 billion in EV investments.

With companies providing far more electric vehicles than consumers want, Toyota’s Chairman Akio Toyoda this week claimed “people are finally seeing (the) reality” of EVs.

There are many reasons for this sudden slump. But a few stick out.

For one, even after all the subsidies, EVs are still pricey, especially at current interest rates, which have nearly doubled from an average of 3.9% at the end of 2021 to around 7.4% today.

Meanwhile, anywhere from a quarter to a third of EV charging stations is out or disabled at any given time. There are an estimated 150,000 gas stations in the U.S., but just 10,000 fast-charging outlets. And even if you find a working charger, it’s expensive: Roadside chargers can be five to 10 times more costly than home chargers.

What happens if you’re in the middle of nowhere and you can’t find a working charger? Sorry, your “car” is no longer a car. It’s now dead metal.

A just-released report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation finds that Americans don’t fully understand the real costs of EVs due to the government’s massive involvement in the market. The numbers are shocking: “The average model year 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners,” the report notes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When the Justice Department Spied on Congress How officials snooped on staffers investigating Justice’s press leaks and investigations.

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/department-of-justice-congress-spying-jason-foster-empower-oversight-f2d6235e?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Justice Department’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation is the fiasco that keeps on giving, and look no further than this week’s revelations of abuse of power. The latest news is that Justice snooped on the Congressional investigators who dared to conduct oversight of its snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign.

Numerous current and former congressional staffers have learned that Justice subpoenaed their personal phone and email records in 2017, likely under the pretext of a leak investigation. The targets included Republican and Democratic staffers in the Senate and House.

***

They join staffers and Members of the House Intelligence Committee, who over the past two years said they were notified by Google or

Apple

that Justice seized their data. By our count, executive-branch prosecutors have now been caught fishing through the records of more than a dozen employees of the congressional branch. DOJ’s inspector general is probing the matter.

Last week Google notified Jason Foster, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s former chief investigative counsel on the Judiciary Committee, that Justice sought and received Mr. Foster’s personal records. In a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request to Justice, Mr. Foster’s nonprofit, Empower Oversight, lays out the scope of Justice’s search.

The FOIA letter to Justice says Google received a federal subpoena on Sept. 12, 2017, for records related to a Foster family telephone number, as well as other accounts that are redacted but that Empower Oversight believes belonged to other staffers.

“For each of the listed telephone and email accounts, the subpoena compelled Google to release customer or subscriber information, as well as subscribers’ names, addresses, local and long distance telephone connection records, text message logs, records of session times and durations, length of service and types of service utilized for the period from December 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017,” says the letter. DOJ wanted to know Mr. Foster’s sources and methods.

Recall what was going on at that time. The Washington Post in 2017 reported on a wiretapped phone call between incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak—an egregious leak of classified information. The Senate Judiciary Committee sought answers from DOJ about the Flynn probe and the leak.

DOJ provided few answers to Congress, though in an effort to justify its snooping it revealed that it also had a surveillance warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. Details of that classified Page warrant soon leaked to the press, via stories that sought to bolster the FBI’s narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.

At the time DOJ was essentially run by career officials, after then Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from Trump-Russia questions, while former FBI Director James Comey had been fired that May.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Premodern Diversity Vs. Civilizational Unity Old immigration once enriched America, but our new version is destroying it By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 26th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/26/premodern-diversity-vs-civilizational-unity/

Few Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century AD empire celebrated their newfound “diversity” of marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals.

These tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had created it.

Their agendas were focused on destroying the civilization they overran rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the Empire.

Ironically, Rome’s prior greatness had been due to the extension of citizenship to diverse people throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

Millions had been assimilated, integrated, and intermarried and often superseded the original Italians of the early Roman Republic. Such fractious diversity had led to unity around the idea of Rome.

New citizens learned to enjoy the advantages of habeas corpus, sophisticated roads, aqueducts, and public architecture, and the security offered by the legions.

The unity of these diverse peoples fused into a single culture that empowered Rome. In contrast, the later disunity of hundreds of thousands of tribal people flooding into and dividing Rome doomed it.

To meet the challenge of a multiracial society, the only viable pathway to a stable civilization of racially and ethnically different people is a single, shared culture.

Some nations can find collective success as a single homogenous people like Japan or Switzerland.

Or equally, but with more difficulty, nations can prosper with heterodox peoples—but only if united by a single, inclusive culture as the American melting-pot once attested.

But a baleful third option—a multicultural society of diverse, unassimilated, and often rival tribes—historically is a prescription for collective suicide.