EDUCATION Comments turned off

Majority of Black People Support Supreme Court Ban on Affirmative Action More black people say affirmative action puts them at a disadvantage than an advantage. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/majority-of-black-people-support-supreme-court-ban-on-affirmative-action/

While the bulk of the mainstream media coverage of the Supreme Court decision banning colleges from basing college admissions on race consists of the expected leftist hysteria and propaganda, a small number of inside baseball stories largely aimed at talking Dems down from the high ladder, tell the truth.

You would never know it from most of the media’s coverage but the vast majority of Americans oppose using race to decide who gets into college.

84% of white adults oppose colleges considering race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept

81% of Hispanics oppose it

76% of Asians oppose it

So do 71% of blacks

Asians are not even the top non-white group to oppose racial discrimination in college admissions, Hispanics are.

Black people, on whose behalf the whole affirmative action college debate has been waged, oppose it 71% to 28% and they’re the group most favorably inclined to it.

Awkward. Obviously.

Strikingly, black people don’t much like affirmative action and a majority backed the Supreme Court decision.

Indeed, more of them actually approved of the decision (more than 4 in 10) than disapproved (fewer than 4 in 10). And more Black Americans “strongly” approved (31 percent) than disapproved (26 percent).

MEDIA Comments turned off

Mark Zuckerberg’s safe space Meta’s ‘kinder’, ‘friendlier’ Twitter rival might be the most censorious platform yet. Fraser Myers

Posted By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/08/threads-mark-zuckerbergs-safe-space/

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter last year, the people formerly known as ‘blue ticks’ have been threatening to flounce off. Twitter, they say, has become an unusable hellhole, rife with disinformation and proto-fascist hate speech. A great Twitter exodus has been promised once every few months, yet still they have carried on tweeting.

Why did so few of them ever leave Twitter? The main barrier has been the lack of a viable alternative. Twitter, for good or ill, has remained the world’s public square. But that could be about to change. This week, Threads, the new social-media app from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, was launched to huge fanfire. It has been explicitly pitched as a rival to Twitter. Within the first 24 hours of its launch, 30million users are said to have signed up.

Threads is effectively a clone of Twitter. It is a ‘text-based social app’ or ‘microblogging service’. As with Twitter, posts on Threads have strict character limits. Twitter’s retweet function has become ‘repost’ and quote tweets have become ‘quote threads’. Even the name Threads seems to be a nod to a ‘Twitter thread’ – a connected series of tweets, posted by the same Twitter user, to get around the character limit.

The similarities between the two rival apps are so stark and so noticeable that Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Meta. Meta has hardly tried to hide the similarities, either. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in over a decade. It was of the Spiderman meme – where two men in exactly the same Spiderman outfit point at each other, unable to tell the real thing from the imposter. Besides, ripoffs of other platforms are not unknown at Meta. For instance, Instagram Stories are a shameless copy of Snapchat, while Instagram’s Reels feature is an obvious imitation of TikTok.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Explosive Video: ‘Missing Witness’ Says He Told DOJ in 2019 About Biden Family’s Corrupt Dealings with China By Victoria Taft

Posted By on July 8th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/07/07/explosive-video-missing-witness-says-he-told-doj-in-2019-about-biden-familys-corrupt-dealings-with-china-n1708908

A mole in the U.S. Department of Justice “shared classified information with Hunter Biden and his Chinese partners” and tipped off the Biden family about an investigation into their corrupt dealings with a Chinese energy company with spy ties, and the feds arrested a whistleblower overseas to stop him from getting to the U.S. to testify to the House Oversight Committee. These are among the explosive allegations the “missing witness” in the Biden family corruption investigation has revealed in a video from a secret location.

The man, Dr. Gal Luft, an Israeli citizen who once headed a Washington and China-tied think tank with former CIA Director James Woolsey, released a video this week explaining all of the above allegations and more. The New York Post’s Miranda Devine broke the story while the country celebrated Independence Day and cocaine was found at the White House.

Luft explains that instead of being on the lam from the Department of Justice that wants to put him away for what he says are bogus arms and Foreign Agent Registration Act charges, he was forced to release a video to tell his side of this extraordinary story. He says his first mistake was “a fatal decision I made in March of 2019 to share with the U.S. Government my knowledge about the Biden family’s relations with CEFC,” the Chinese energy company that had ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence agency.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The CDC Gives Advice for Men Who Want to ‘Breastfeed’ By Matt Margolis

Posted By on July 8th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/07/07/the-cdc-gives-advice-for-men-who-want-to-breastfeed-n1708925

Humanity is doomed. I’m sorry to say it, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else one can conclude. Individuals and once-reputable organizations are going to absurd lengths to perpetuate the myths that people can be born in the “wrong body” and that plastic surgery and drug injections can actually change one’s sex.

Those who perpetuated this nonsense were once limited to the fringes of society; now, it’s become mainstream. Even though polls show a large majority of Americans reject radical left-wing gender ideology, health organizations and even our government have been bullied into endorsing it lock, stock, and barrel.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did itself no favors during the COVID pandemic, having endorsed universal masking and vaccines for children. Now it has managed to beclown itself once again by giving advice to biological men on how to “breastfeed.”

Of course, it’s no longer to be called “breastfeeding” because that’s not inclusive enough. Now, they’re calling it “chestfeeding.” We can’t risk offending those who don’t have breasts (also known as men) who think they can defy nature and successfully feed a newborn child mother’s milk.

“The CDC advice isn’t just for biological women who have removed their breasts but still want to nurse babies, it’s also for biological men, who through the magic of plastic surgery also have breasts and would now like to use these breasts to feed babies,” reports Karol Markowitz at the New York Post. “As that’s biologically impossible, the CDC suggests getting help with ‘maximizing milk production, supplementing with pasteurized donor human milk or formula, medication to induce lactation.’”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly Government and social-media companies colluded to stifle dissenters who turned out to be right. By Bret Swanson

Posted By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-censorship-proved-to-be-deadly-social-media-government-pandemic-health-697c32c4?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

In the wake of the 1986 Challenger space-shuttle explosion, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman knew that the truth would both fuel progress and soothe the nation’s sorrow. “For a successful technology,” he said, “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

For three years, pandemic public relations mocked nature, generating fear, illness, inflation and excess death beyond what the virus caused. Digital censorship supercharged the effort to hide reality, but reality is getting its day in court.

On July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty temporarily blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media companies and third-party groups to censor speech.

Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among government agencies and social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits.

Elon Musk’s release of some of Twitter’s internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly weren’t fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy.

The results of these relationships? Twitter blacklisted Stanford physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya for showing Covid almost exclusively threatened the elderly, severely reducing the visibility of his tweets. When Stanford health policy scholar Scott Atlas began advising the White House, YouTube erased his most prominent video opposing lockdowns. Twitter banned Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology, for calling attention to the vaccines’ dangers. YouTube demonetized evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who suggested the virus might be engineered and predicted vaccine-evading variants. And those are only a few examples.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Short-Sighted New Health Rule The Administration is taking away cheaper insurance options from consumers to jam everyone into the ObamaCare exchanges.

Posted By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-short-sighted-new-health-rule-96d90d3e?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Here’s a definition of Bidenomics you won’t hear from the White House: Forcing Americans to buy expensive products they don’t want or need. Behold the President’s plan to limit short-term health insurance plans in order to jam more consumers into the heavily subsidized and regulated ObamaCare exchanges.

The Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury Departments on Friday proposed rules to roll back the Trump Administration’s expansion of short-term, limited-duration insurance (STLDI) plans. Since 2018 these plans have been available in 12-month increments, and consumers have been able to renew them for up to 36 months.

Short-term plans aren’t required to provide comprehensive benefits, including pediatric services, maternity care and mental health treatment. They are thus much cheaper than the heavily-regulated plans on the ObamaCare exchanges, which must provide 10 “essential” benefits and are restricted in their ability to charge premiums based on age and risk.

These plans are especially attractive to young people whose employers don’t provide coverage. Why would a healthy 26-year-old want to pay for maternity, pediatric and other services he probably won’t use in the near future? Instead, he could use the thousands of dollars in savings from enrolling in short-term plans to repay student loans.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Riots Again in France by Alain Destexhe

Posted By on July 7th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19781/riots-again-in-france

These responses — skirting due process at the highest levels of government — show the fear that the suburbs instill in those in power: the fear of a generalized conflagration, the fear of another death, the fear that control of the situation is slipping away, the fear of the inability to control these uprisings or the root causes that breed them.

Some of these suburbs have long since become lawless zones, or rather zones of “alternative law,” where drug kingpins and Muslim imams now rule the roost, and where the police only move in force from time to time. In some neighborhoods, drug dealers have set up physical obstacles that make it difficult for the police to gain access when they decide to intervene by force, when the authorities can pretend that they still control something.

It is necessary to deal with the cause — excessive and uncontrolled immigration — both legal (through family reunification and the right of asylum) and illegal. When you are faced with a leak in a boat that is on the verge of sinking, as French society is, you not only have to have to bail out the water, but also plug the breach.

There are “two Frances” facing each other. One is violent, ready to riot at the first opportunity, encouraged by political parties who see it as an electoral reservoir. The other, still in the majority, is dignified and peaceful, outraged by the behavior of these young people of immigrant origin — but who remain silent and do nothing.

France seems slowly heading for civil war.

Following the killing of a 17-year-old boy, France is once again the scene of riots that reflect the gulf between traditional France and the suburbs — the result of immigration over the last 40 years.

Nahel Merzouk was killed by police. He was being chased in Nanterre, near Paris, by two policemen on a motorcycle for traffic violations and refusal to stop the car he was driving. After Merzouk was forced to stop the car due to traffic congestion, the policemen approached his car and drew their weapons. Merzouk then drove off, at which point one of the policemen fired his weapon at the car, fatally wounding Merzouk. If Merzouk had followed the orders of the police, he would not have died.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Making Sense of the Jenin Raid Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on July 7th, 2023

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

Israel’s military operation in Jenin has ended and the IDF has withdrawn from the Palestinian town. You can see some of the results here and weapons caches in mosques here. Evidence of Iranian-sponsored terror organizations living in the middle of the civilian Palestinian population can be seen here.

Even Haaretz journalist Amos Harel almost acknowledged that Israel avoided Palestinian civilian casualties, although the IDF entered a densely populated area of the city. However, he did not note that the reason the IDF was there was because terrorists deliberately located themselves in the heart of this area.

Harel also suggested a sort of “tit for tat” aspect to the Palestinian response: “There was a stabbing attack in Bnei Brak and a vehicular ramming and stabbing attack in Tel Aviv.”

Indeed, the headline of the piece was “Macabre Dance will Persist.”

So, for Harel this is a “dance.” Palestinian terrorists attempt to kill Israeli civilians while burrowed in among their own civilians—two war crimes in one—and this is the same thing as the IDF’s attempt to eliminate the source of this terror.

Harel is not alone in his view. As you watch and read media coverage of the Jenin raid—especially in The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC and Al Jazeera—remember that this is not Israel’s first incursion into Jenin.

During the so-called “second intifada,” Israel took the initiative and removed terrorist emplacements in the city. Western media reported Palestinian claims of 1,000 civilians killed and buried in mass graves as fact. But eventually, Western reporters proved that “about 50 Palestinians had fought and died in a ferocious battle that also cost the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers.”

With that in mind, note a recent New York Times headline: “Jenin Has a Long Legacy as a Bastion of Palestinian Armed Struggle.” The town, the article said, has “nurtured an ethos of defiance.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

U.S. Department of Defense lowers fitness standards for transgender members embracing ‘authenticity’ By Eric Utter

Posted By on July 7th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/us_department_of_defense_lowers_fitness_standards_for_transgender_members_

The Army is still in love with woke and with Major Rachel Jones.

A recent tweet from the United States Department of Defense stated:

“@USArmy Maj. Rachel Jones found solace after coming out as a transgender female. Her journey from battling depression & suicidal thoughts to embracing authenticity inspires us all. #whyweserve”

The tweet featured a picture of Maj. Jones wearing camo and holding a Pride flag in each hand. The camouflage uniform doesn’t hide the fact that Maj. Jones is considerably overweight. Nor does it hide the fact that he she is struggling with mental illness. Tragically, the same can be said about a great many in today’s Obama-Biden military.

In fact, U.S. service members who identify as transgender can now apparently seek an indefinite fitness standards exemption. So Maj. Jones could avoid PT while he she focuses on battling depression– and transphobia.

The world has arguably never needed America’s historically extraordinarily benevolent but incredibly lethal military more than it does today. And that military, the same one that defeated the British (twice), the Germans (twice), the Japanese—and that more recently effectively defeated the fourth largest standing army in the world (Iraq’s, in the Gulf War) in roughly four days—is now a shell of its former self. Its civilian and military leadership has completely redefined, remade, and re-tasked it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Two Americas Collide at the Supreme Court By Matthew Boose

Posted By on July 7th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/06/two-americas-collide-at-the-supreme-court/

When President Biden fumed that the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling is “not normal,” he spoke more truth than he may have intended. It is certainly not normal nowadays to acknowledge, even implicitly, that discrimination against whites is possible, or even wrong. The Supreme Court blasted the vaporous pretexts that elites have used to justify this invidious scheme, which has carried on indefinitely, feasting on countless dreams without satisfying a bottomless hunger of unquantifiable grievance. The sentimental and, arguably, self-serving wailing of the dissenters, particularly Justice Jackson, draws from that same source.

Although affirmative action has long been unpopular with the public, the outcome in this case is paradoxically more provocative than the Dobbs decision, which cut against popular opinion on abortion. The reason is that racially conscious discrimination has been the rule of American life for the better part of a century. When, in the majority opinion, the famously milquetoast John Roberts asserted that all racial discrimination is bad, he was appealing to a supposed truism that has been repudiated in theory and practice by this country’s ruling class.

To the left, the court’s colorblind worldview is casuistry. Judging by the fruits of civil rights, the left would seem to have the better argument. From its inception, civil rights has meant almost exclusively treating certain groups favorably and others disfavorably. Affirmative action at elite universities was merely the most high-stakes example of this system. From corporate hiring to television advertising and the way newspapers report, or do not report, crime, life in America is now encoded in the subtlest of ways by racial preferences. Even in the most informal of situations, everyone understands the power of the proverbial “race card.” Some employees are virtually unfireable because of their skin color. Freedom of speech has been throttled by a pervasive dread of retaliation for causing even unintentional offense on the basis of race.

Justices Sotomayor and Jackson envision a totalitarian nightmare where wealth, honors, and opportunities are perpetually redistributed until some intangible state of “equality” is reached. Yet this terror, indistinguishable from communism, is the reality in which Americans have lived for a long time. The disruption of that reality makes the court’s ruling anomalous. Can civil rights law now be repurposed to protect everyone, as originally advertised? Perhaps, but the role of blind luck and accident in this ruling should not be underestimated. Had Donald Trump lost in 2016, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a bit more humility, these opinions would have been flipped.