Universities Decide Jewish Students Don’t Need Protection All groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others. January 12, 2023 by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/universities-decide-jewish-students-dont-need-protection/

In their zeal to construct an academic setting that reflects the true diversity of the nation—and simultaneously attempts to redress past discrimination and exclusion— universities have created campuses that have evolved in an opposite direction. Rather than helping students adapt to the real diversity of society outside the campus walls, the diversity ‘movement’ in the hands of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) diversocrats has served to create balkanized campuses where victims of the moment segregate themselves into distinct and inward-looking racial and cultural groups—exactly the opposite intention of the diversity credo.

Students from “underrepresented,” “marginalized,” and “protected” minority groups, who may well initially arrive at campuses thinking of themselves as part of mainstream society, are taught, in the name of diversity, to think of themselves differently: as part of a racial, cultural, sexual, or political subset of American life and victims of what is purported to be systemic bigotry.

In his engaging book, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, Charles J. Sykes traced the growth of this culture of victimization and suggested that it has increasingly opened wide divisions between races, economic and social classes, and the advantaged and the disadvantaged — particularly when self-defined victims make unreason­able or exaggerated demands on the larger society by which they feel victimized.

“In the society of victims,” Sykes wrote, “individuals compete not only for rights or economic advantage but also for points on the ‘sensitivity’ index, where ‘feelings’ rather than reason are what count. Once feelings are established as the barometer of acceptable behavior, speech (and, by extension, thought) becomes only as free as the most sensitive group will permit [italics added].”

Stacey Abrams Will Keep Running for Things Until the Money Runs Out “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/stacey-abrams-will-keep-running-for-things-until-the-money-runs-out/

Everyone will have Stacey Abrams to kick around some more.

Democrat Stacey Abrams, the two-time failed candidate for governor in Georgia and a renowned voting rights activist, says she will “likely” run for office again but did not specify for which position.

Abrams, who lost her second bid for Georgia governor in November to incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R), made the comment in an interview with actress Drew Barrymore on her daytime television show broadcast Monday.

“I will likely run again,” Abrams said. “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. If it doesn’t work, you try again.”

How do you lose 53% to 45% in the same state that Warnock won 51% to 48% and then talk glibly about running again?

In the end stages, Stacey Abrams was blaming black men.

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams believes misinformation “targeted” at Black men is the reason she experienced a decline in support from Black voters in a new Marist poll.

What you need to know about Biden’s documents caper The president could pay a political price for staying mum: Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/need-know-joe-biden-classified-documents/

We are still in the early stages of discovering what the documents discovered in Joe Biden’s office at the University of Pennsylvania contain and how highly they were classified, so we don’t yet know how dangerous the violation was. But there are things to keep in mind as the story unfolds.

1. Biden’s lawyers did him a huge favor by instructing him not to ask about the documents

It’s the last stand of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Still, as one tabloid used to proclaim,“Inquiring minds want to know.” In particular, we want to know how sensitive the material really was (overclassification is a problem in Washington) and where the documents were held between the time Biden left the vice presidency and the time the Penn Biden Center opened.

2. Biden might pay a political price for staying mum about possessing the documents improperly

But that price will be considerably diminished because the “neutral” press doesn’t want to hurt a Democrat. The public has observed that bias for years, eroding their trust in the press.

3. Pay no attention to the Department of Justice’s failure to leak anything about the documents’ discovery before the November election

It would not have affected any votes. The Republicans screwed up that election all by themselves. What the DoJ’s silence does tell us is that the department doesn’t leak much when disclosures could hurt Democrats. When they could hurt Republicans, the department is a sieve.

‘Equity’ Is Not The Same As Fairness Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/12/equity-is-not-the-same-as-fairness/

This is the second piece in our series about modern idolatry, also known as secular religion. It discusses the elevation of equity – the principle of outcomes forced to conform to racial and ethnic demographics – to a moral imperative that has penetrated the highest levels of academia, business, and government. It hides behind high-minded platitudes but is at its core a tool for corruptly accruing and wielding economic and political power.

For a start, the main tenet of the Church of Equity is “righteous” reverse discrimination as a way to attain certain outcomes, a seeming contradiction to civil rights and equality under the law. Non-believers are subjected to denunciation as racists and may even lose their livelihoods if they work in an environment that has been intimidated into submission to the faith. Their missionaries are the legions of zealots dedicated to defending and promoting what we call IED – inclusion, equity, and diversity – on college campuses, in companies, and throughout government. Equity is not a benign religion.

Equity has gained traction less for its moral underpinnings than the lure of promised benefits to those who feel underrepresented or inadequately rewarded. People instinctively prefer to be led by others like themselves – the natural affinity for tribalism – and, unsurprisingly, are suspicious if their peers seem to be less successful than members of other tribes. Equity’s focus on demographic entitlement provides the illusion of representative leadership and economic fairness while it discounts considerations of ability, character, and achievement.

But there is good reason to question the elevation of equity. For example, in determining outcomes, why should innate characteristics of race or ethnicity displace other equally innate characteristics such as intelligence and motivation? Why should a record of hard work and achievements be subjugated to an entitlement? Polls show a large majority of people disagree with allocating outcomes by race, in part because they consider individual achievement and merit to be requisites to upward mobility.

Prince Harry’s 400-page temper tantrum Spare is one of the most annoying books I have ever read. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/11/prince-harrys-400-page-temper-tantrum/

This is the most annoying book I have read in a long time. Even the bio on the first page is annoying. The Duke of Sussex, it says, is ‘a husband, father, humanitarian, military veteran, mental-wellness advocate and environmentalist’. I’m surprised it didn’t add ‘He / him’. Environmentalist? Mother Nature might have something to say about that. The man who once flew in a private jet to a Google camp in Sicily to speak about climate change, and who snorted ‘No one is perfect’ when a hack had the temerity to point out that 60 per cent of the flights he takes are on private jets, is now putting ‘environmentalist’ in his actual bio? Now that’s chutzpah. Or gaslighting. One of those.

Actually, Spare is a big, fat, wordy act of gaslighting. It’s a 400-page tantrum about family and money and tiaras (I’m not joking). It’s primal therapy masquerading as memoir, where the aim seems to be less to tell the truth about what’s being going on in the deranged House of Windsor than to absolve Harry and Meghan of any responsibility for it. These two are never to blame for anything, apparently. Drama and malice just magically appear whenever they’re around. Curious. Most of all, Spare is an act of fraternal treachery. I don’t know much about life in a royal family. But I know about brothers. And I know that if any of my brothers did to me what Harry has done to William in this infernal book, it would be game over. The betrayal of confidence contained in this self-pitying tome is extraordinary.

Irritation drips from every page. There’s the Jamie Oliver-style banterous lingo. Harry goes on a ‘lads’ trip’ with a ‘bunch of muppets’. His grandpa, Prince Philip, liked to ‘rock a bit of scruff now and then’, he says, by which he means grow facial hair. He loves a cheeky Nando’s. That’s a surefire way of ‘enhancing my calm’, he says – ‘Nando’s chicken’. He and a mate were ‘proper fucked’ once when they tried to round up some cows. ‘Fuck fuck fuck’, he says to himself in Afghanistan, like one of the middle-class characters in a Richard Curtis film. One of his military superiors had ‘the heart of a fucking ninja’, he says. ‘And at that moment I needed a ninja.’ At Eton he watches Family Guy ‘while stoned’ and forms an ‘inexplicable bond with Stewie’.

What to do about Biden’s classified documents? by Byron York

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/what-to-do-about-bidens-classified-docs

WHAT TO DO ABOUT BIDEN’S CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS? On Monday evening came one of those stories that seem almost too convenient to be true. CBS News reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a U.S. attorney to investigate classified documents found in an office used by President Joe Biden after he left the vice presidency.

What???!!! Does that mean the current president improperly held classified documents like his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, is accused of doing? As if on cue, reporters at a number of news outlets jumped into action, determined to explain to readers that the cases are totally different. Worried that Republicans would “seize” on the news to suggest an equivalence between Biden and Trump, many in the media sought to portray the two investigations as entirely dissimilar affairs: Trump bad, Biden not bad.

But there are some distinct similarities, both in what we know and what we don’t know, about the Biden and Trump investigations. First, the most obvious: Both men apparently kept classified information at a place they used for business after leaving office. As commentators reminded us many, many times during the Trump investigation, that can be a very serious problem. Both men had the highest access to classified information, Biden as vice president and Trump as president. And both men left those high offices to set up working spaces in other places, Biden at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., and Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Florida.

Here is a really important similarity. In neither case do we know what the classified documents were. All through the Trump investigation, with so much sensational and overwrought reporting — all through that time, the public never knew what the documents were that Trump allegedly mishandled. Were they truly the nation’s most important national security secrets? Or were they examples of the overclassification that plagues the federal government, when noncritical information is classified at a higher level than it deserves, if it should be classified at all? We don’t know the answer in the Trump case, and we don’t know the answer in the Biden case.

Jew-Hate at American Universities by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19298/jew-hate-universities

[The Amcha] report paints a stark picture of an increasing, intensifying and carefully coordinated campaign of attacks on Jewish identity at over 60% of the colleges and universities that are popular with Jews, including 2,000 incidents intended to harm Jewish students since 2015.

[T]hese activists demand an end to Zionism, which… means just one thing: an end to the democratic State of Israel. This itself is antisemitism in any book and is spelt out as such in the US State Department definition of antisemitism.

Despite expending so much energy against their fellow students, German Gentiles had plenty left for their Jewish professors. Unsatisfied with Nazi race regulations restricting Jewish faculty, students boycotted the classes of those who were exempt under the race laws and pressured university authorities to dismiss them. The result was that every Jewish professor who was still legally allowed to teach had resigned by 1935.

The Amcha report characterises the situation on US campuses today as a crisis for American Jews. It is much more than that. It is a crisis for us all that one section of our student body is bullied, abused, intimidated and cast down by their fellow students and often abandoned by their professors and faculty authorities.

It is high time for the federal government, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to withdraw its funding from all universities that participate in bigotry such as that.

As Jews were hounded out of German universities in the 1930s, where would you have stood? Many of us would like to think we would have found the moral and if necessary physical courage to stand up for our fellow students rather than see them persecuted, bullied, abused and thrown out. Well, now we can actually put our courage to the test as before our eyes we see a re-run of an almost identical pattern of antisemitism — this time at American colleges, with a similar picture at universities in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

A new study by the antisemitism watchdog Amcha Initiative documents a pervasive, relentless assault on Jewish identity at US universities.

Ron Klain says Biden’s got inflation licked so all’s hunky dory By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/ron_klain_says_bidens_got_inflation_licked_so_alls_hunky_dory.html

Just as Joe Biden gets ready to declare his plan to run for reelection, out come the cuckoos from Clock Biden, telling us there’s nothing to see anymore on inflation. It’s all gone, so put those coupons and calculators at the supermarket away.

That’s what we are effectively getting from White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who, after assuring us inflation was ‘transitory’ now assures us inflation is all done and over with.

Now, what he’s referring to is a January 5 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Democrat political fixture Alan Blinder, who’s a professor of economics at Princeton these days. Blinder avers that the Fed’s successive rate hikes have brought the rate of increases down, and so, the month-on-month inflation rate is indeed 2.5%. What’s pesky, he notes, is that everyone is looking at the annual inflation rate, which currently stands at 7.1%.

According to Matt Margolis, writing at PJMedia:

“When inflation was at 40-year highs, there was no shortage of coverage. But now,” he tweeted, pointing to a report that inflation in the second half of 2022 decreased to 2% after climbing to a rate above 7%.

According to data released by the U.S. Labor Department on Dec. 13, the annual inflation rate for the 12 months ending in November 2022 was 7.1%, down from 7.7% before.

The annual inflation rate was 7.0% in 2021 and 1.4% in 2020. The highest annual inflation rate under President Trump was 2.3%

Well whoop dee doo.

Dear Young People: College Is Lame. Get a Job. By Lincoln Brown

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2023/01/10/dear-young-people-college-is-lame-get-a-job-n1660538

Young people, are you ready for success? Want a career in a rewarding field that will lead to a fulfilling life? Don’t go to college. Be an electrician, be a plumber, be a welder,  be a carpenter — hell, learn to code — but for heaven’s sake and for that matter, your own, don’t go to college. I know some of you are months or even years away from high school graduation, but: Don’t. Go. To. College. Okay, so if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, or physicist (more on that below), maybe look for a college that does not double as an asylum. Other than that, treat college campuses like the radioactive waste depots that they have become.

Back when I was your age, everybody had to go to college. “Get a liberal arts degree,” my mother said. “You can do anything with a liberal arts degree.” You can’t do much with a liberal arts degree in the 21st century. Actually, you couldn’t do much with one in the 20th century, but no one seemed to know that. We were all supposed to go to college. One person told me to skip it and be a plumber. Not a day goes by that I do not rue failing to heed that advice.

Today, oh young people, college is likely to be a monumental waste of time and money: time you could have spent learning how to do something that people need; and money you could have been earning instead of waiting to see if Biden’s magical student loan forgiveness plan will take root and blossom. (Hint: the election is over. You won’t hear anything more about that until 2024.)

If you do go to college, you may be looking for a challenging atmosphere, an exchange of ideas, and opportunities to grow and craft a future. Instead, like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, you will find yourself on a tiny raft, adrift on a cold, gray, featureless sea with a rotting albatross of a student loan hanging on your neck. And if you don’t get that reference, find someone with a liberal arts degree. Once they explain it, ask if that explanation was worth all the money they paid.

College is lame and depressing. For example:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed a number of conservatives to the board of the uber-left New College of Florida. One student said, “I got really sad and then just, like, laid down.” Just, like, laid down. It’s a board, kid, you didn’t get a terminal diagnosis. Students are also concerned that their personal safety is at risk, according to The Daily Caller. At risk from what? A different idea?

COVID: Who Was Right? By John Stossel

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/01/11/covid-who-was-right-n1660596

It’s now been three years since COVID hit. 

At the start of the pandemic, “experts” shouted: “Stay home!” “Close schools!” “Wash your hands!” “Disinfect countertops!” 

Clearly, disinfecting countertops and washing hands made no difference. What about closing schools and lockdowns?

The media trashed Gov. Ron DeSantis when he lifted Florida’s lockdown. “Acting irresponsibly!” roared MSNBC’s Dr. Vin Gupta. Reporters praised New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s lockdowns.

On CNN, Andrew’s brother Chris gushed, “I am wowed by what you did!” By contrast, he said, Florida was “in such dire straits.”

But actually, adjusted for population, Florida and New York had about the same number of deaths. Given that Florida has more old people, Florida did better than New York. Much of the media just reports what it wants to believe.

My new video this week covers which states and countries handled COVID well and which didn’t.