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John Brennan’s Protests to President Trump Lifting his Security Clearances are Absurd John Brennan’s outrage over losing his security clearance is as hollow as the falsehoods he peddled to shield Biden in 2020. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/31/john-brennans-protests-to-president-trump-lifting-his-security-clearances-are-absurd/

Former CIA Director John Brennan is angry that President Trump signed an executive order last week lifting his security clearances. The president took this action because Brennan was one of 51 former intelligence officers who meddled in the 2020 presidential election by signing a letter they knew falsely claimed a damaging press story about a laptop owned by President Biden’s son Hunter was Russian disinformation.

Brennan indignantly asserted in an MSNBC interview that President Trump’s action was “bizarre” and said he misrepresented the laptop letter, claiming that based on their intelligence experience, the signatories were “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

Brennan also said he needs to hold security clearances as a former intelligence officer so administration officials can consult with him on national security matters.

Brennan’s objections are absurd and justify the President’s executive order.

Brennan’s claims defending the laptop letter are patently false. The 51 former intelligence officers did not sign the letter as a well-intentioned initiative to warn the American people about a possible Russian attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. They knew this wasn’t true.

We know this because one of the principal organizers of the letter, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, testified during an investigation by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees about the letter’s purpose:

“There were two intents. One intent was to share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue, and two, it was to help Vice President Biden.”

The House investigation also found that the letter signers were informed “of the intent of the statement prior to its publication, writing that the statement was meant to insulate Vice President Biden from serious electoral vulnerabilities created by his family’s influence peddling activities.”

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FLASHBACK: Biden’s FAA Focused on Diversity, Hiring Workers With Severe Disabilities Matt Margolis

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/01/30/flashback-bidens-faa-focused-on-diversity-hired-workers-with-severe-disabilities-n4936514

While we don’t know yet what caused the midair collision between the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and a civilian airliner in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday night, renewed attention is turning to Biden-era DEI initiatives at the FAA and whether they may have played a role.

“The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website,” the New York Post reported a year ago.

“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website stated. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

The FAA’s website also noted that individuals with “severe” mental and physical disabilities are the most underrepresented group within the federal workforce.

“Because diversity is so critical, FAA actively supports and engages in a variety of associations, programs, coalitions, and initiatives to support and accommodate employees from diverse communities and backgrounds. Our people are our strength, and we take great care in investing in and valuing them as such,” the website stated.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

‘We Never Gave Up’: Texas Whistleblower Went Toe-to-Toe with the Gender-Industrial Complex — and Won By David Zimmermann

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/we-never-gave-up-texas-whistleblower-went-toe-to-toe-with-the-gender-industrial-complex-and-won/

Just last week, Dr. Eithan Haim came days away from going to federal prison — and he has no regrets.

As federal prosecutors were preparing to accelerate the now-dismissed criminal case against the Texas Children’s Hospital whistleblower, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department stepped in just in time.

On Friday, the Justice Department’s new leadership dropped the second superseding indictment against the surgeon, who had been accused by the Biden Justice Department of violating the privacy of patients protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The only problem is he didn’t.

Haim disclosed carefully redacted medical records in May 2023, showing that Texas Children’s physicians were surgically inserting hormonal devices into gender-dysphoric pediatric patients as part of the hospital’s transgender program. No individually identifiable health information was unethically revealed. Furthermore, he exposed that the Houston-based hospital was secretly continuing trans medical procedures in violation of Texas law after it had supposedly ended them.

Haim felt it was his moral obligation to tell the truth, even if he was punished for his actions.

“In the very beginning, I knew if I was gonna blow the whistle that we’d have to go fully in no matter the consequences,” Haim told National Review. “I asked my wife, ‘Is this something you’re willing to die for?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ too. It sounds kind of hyperbolic, but that was the only way we would do it.”

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Enough Is Enough Noah Rothman

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/enough-is-enough/

The campus experience at Columbia University over the last week is illustrative of the hell to which America’s students have been consigned since the October 7 massacre.

As students embarked on the spring semester last week, a “band of masked keffiyeh-clad students” intruded on a course on modern Israeli history where they threw “flyers featuring a smashed Star of David underneath a boot, a burning Israeli flag, and weapon-carrying militants at students,” Fox News reported. The vandals continued to distribute literature insisting that “the enemy will not see tomorrow” and announcing their intention to “burn Zionism to the ground,” until this week, when they resorted to insurrection. “We cemented the sewage lines of the entire building,” the Columbia branch of Students for Justice in Palestine announced, “forcing them to shut down business-as-usual.”

It’s almost as if Columbia’s administrators learned no lessons from their efforts to appease the violent professional demonstrators who took over their campus last year when they threatened and harassed Jews, did violence to their campus, and forced the administration to reluctantly sic the NYPD on them.

The same could be said of colleges across the country. Despite the humiliation Republicans duly meted out to a few Ivy League presidents for their conspicuous tolerance of antisemitism, this menace still plagues colleges across the country. The onset of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has had no effect on this tempo of antisocial activism, revealing once and for all that the unrest is fueled not by the war Hamas started but by the existence of the Jewish state.

Something must be done to force American colleges to do their jobs — elementary stuff, such as protecting from physical injury and stultifying intimidation the students who pay exorbitant sums to be there. “This failure is unacceptable,” an executive order promulgated by the president last night read, “and ends today.”

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Air Traffic Control and the DEI Debate By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/air-traffic-control-and-the-dei-debate/

After last night’s air disaster culminated a series of near-misses over the past four years, American air travel remains astonishingly safe, and the likelihood is that a full investigation will find that last night’s crash of an Army Blackhawk helicopter into a commercial airliner was (1) a total freak accident, (2) the result of a mechanical problem with the helicopter, and/or (3) human error by the helicopter pilot, perhaps compounded by poor air-traffic control. Efforts to blame this on Donald Trump, whose transportation secretary Sean Duffy only took office yesterday morning, say more about the people pointing fingers than about the actual causes of the tragedy.

All that being said, it’s worth noting here as the inevitable hurdy-gurdy cranks into gear that Trump has actually moved to fix a problem with how we hire air-traffic controllers, in order to reorient it toward hiring the best people in order to make air-traffic control safer. The Biden administration was sued last year over this:

From 1989 to 2013, the Collegiate Training Initiative program was a pipeline to a career in air traffic control. The program aimed to ensure future air traffic controllers had the skills and knowledge necessary to carry out the job. More than ten years ago, the Obama Administration scrapped 1000 qualified candidates. The administration’s justification was that the pool of applicants was not diverse enough, so they would be purged from consideration. Instead of hiring candidates with the most competency, individuals were elevated for hiring consideration based on their race…I, along with Mountain States Legal Foundation, am litigating a class action lawsuit on behalf of more than 900 prospective air traffic controllers who studied, took the pre-employment exam, and passed the test with flying colors but were dismissed because of their skin color. Our lawsuit seeks justice for all air traffic control candidates who chose this career, dedicated their lives and education to it, and were summarily denied a job for no reason other than the color of their skin. In a system with only 14,000 air traffic controllers, purging a thousand of the next generation’s best and brightest was irresponsible and unsustainable.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘The Brutalist’: A Must-See Masterpiece? Or a self-indulgent, exploitative, Hollywood agitprop? by Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-brutalist-a-must-see-masterpiece/

I have never witnessed the avalanche of acclaim for a new release such as I’ve seen for the 2024 film The Brutalist. The Brutalist is the biopic of a fictional character. Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who is commissioned to build a Doylestown, Pennsylvania community center in the Brutalist architectural style. A man of intense artistic dedication and integrity, he overcomes roadblocks, and realizes his dream.

Why is a movie about a Hungarian immigrant in Doylestown, PA advancing like a tornado through a wheat field, toppling critics into adoring prostration? Filmmaker Brady Corbet doesn’t understand. “If something is really radical, people initially don’t like it … people are connecting with The Brutalist … I’m completely confused.”

Below, a review of reaction to the film, a summary of the film, and then my own take on The Brutalist.

The Brutalist is a three-hour-thirty-five-minute long period drama. It was directed by former child actor Brady Corbet and co-written by Corbet and his life partner, Norwegian actress Mona Fastvold. It stars Adrien Brody, who won an Academy Award for his depiction of real-life Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman in the 2002 Roman Polanski masterpiece, The Pianist. The Brutalist has been nominated for dozens of awards. It racked up five wins at the Venice International Film Festival, and Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture – Drama; Best Actor for Adrien Brody; and Best Director for Brady Corbet.

The Brutalist enjoys a 93% positive rating at RottenTomatoes. Fico Cangiano’s review is representational. “Stunning … sweeping … epic. An ambitious exploration of the immigrant experience, the pursuit of the American dream and human behavior. The best film of 2024.” The Atlantic says “An expansive but stark look at the successes and challenges involved in making personal art in a capitalist system.” The Washington Post says, “An irresistible object — Laszlo — meets the immovable forces of American caste, capitalism, aesthetics and exclusion … [these] slowly tighten” their “stranglehold on Laszlo’s dreams.” The San Francisco Chronicle reports, “Adrien Brody is a walking open wound.” American capitalists “attempt to distort his vision for budgetary or bonehead creative reasons. Yes, The Brutalist is a metaphor for ambitious personal filmmaking.” The Standard decrees that there is only one way to react to The Brutalist. “It is impossible not to recognize The Brutalist as anything other than a filmmaking triumph … a brutal parable for all immigrants and artists who struggle to sublimate themselves in the meatgrinder of America.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Day in the Life of a Christian – Under Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws When, exactly, will the protests in the West begin? by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-christian-under-pakistans-blasphemy-laws/

In Pakistan, blasphemy laws carry a death sentence. These notorious statutes are often used abusively for settling personal scores, making personal gains or for satisfying grudges that one neighbor may have against another.

The country’s blasphemy laws are also used to target minority groups, and Christians are disproportionately affected. Indeed, roughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations target Christians. Business rivals accuse Christian men of blasphemy as a means of destroying their business and reputation.

In 2020, a Christian man was sentenced to death for having allegedly sent “blasphemous” text messages to his former supervisor. He has been held in custody since 2013.

While the death sentence is seldom carried out, people accused of blasphemy are vulnerable to attack or murder by rampaging Muslim mobs. In June 2024, for instance, an elderly man was killed by mob violence after being accused of desecrating the Quran.

In its 2024 report, the human rights organization Open Doors found that anti-Christian violence in Pakistan has been at the maximum possible level for many years. Violence against Christians does not only include widely publicized attacks against the Christian community, such as in the city of Jaranwala in August 2023, but also small scale, localized, and increasingly persistent killings and attacks on Christians and churches, often spurred on by the country’s notorious blasphemy laws, which have been expanded in scope and punishment.

Christians in Pakistan are more frequently arrested and charged than acquitted, and although not all situations are linked with blasphemy accusations, those are the most prominent examples.

In 2023, Pakistan’s National Assembly passed legislation that increased punishment for some forms of blasphemy by raising the penalties from three years to no fewer than 10 years for insulting the companions, wives, and family members of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. The widening of the scope of blasphemy laws and the increase in penalties on conviction demonstrate the level of importance politics and society attach to this topic.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranian People Are Ready To Bring About Regime Change. Does The West See It Coming? Shahin Gobadi

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/30/iranian-people-are-ready-to-bring-about-regime-change-does-the-west-see-it-coming/

It was like yesterday. Nearly 50 years to the day, on Dec. 31, 1977, the Shah held a state dinner for U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Watching on television from my family’s middle-class home in western Tehran, I was eager to hear Carter’s speech. Having visited the U.S. as a curious tourist the previous summer, I had learned a few things about the American political system.

In the middle of the speech, Carter toasted the Shah, saying Iran was “under your majesty, an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” At that, I turned to my uncle beside me, who was back in Iran after years of living in California, and asked, “Where is he talking about? Americans, with their embassy and all its personnel, really don’t know what is going on in Iran?”

Though my uncle abhorred the Shah as much as anyone, he was also keenly aware of the brutality that the Shah’s notorious secret police, SAVAK, used in crushing anyone who expressed such sentiment. That evening, he tried to assure me that the president of the strongest country in the world definitely knew things that an Iranian teenager did not, and that the Shah was irremovable. Our heated argument ended without resolution after my father intervened.

That autumn, I had witnessed anti-government demonstrations by university and high-school students. As an ordinary young Iranian nothing could stop my yearning for freedom. I will never forget the first time I heard the chant “down with the Shah in the streets of central Tehran. Though the Pahlavi dynasty appeared invincible after 57 years of iron-fisted rule, it was doomed less than 14 months after Carter made his remarks.

As an anti-mullah activist, I closely follow developments in Iran, and international policies towards it. It’s clear that Western leaders remain prone to the same faulty assumptions today as they were in 1977.

Despite the visible mistakes made in dealing with the Shah before the 1979 revolution, these errors have been repeated in handling the mullahs’ regime over the past 45 years. Just as Carter labeled the monarchy an “island of stability,” many experts in the U.S. and Europe continued to relay the view that the theocratic dictatorship is here to stay, and that regime change is not feasible.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Abigail Shrier: How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-how-the-gender-fever-broke-trump-executive-order?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Loving, naive parents believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. Now, with the stroke of a pen, a destructive ideology has been eliminated.

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.

On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

To the practitioners and promoters and numberless devotees of pediatric “gender affirming care”—a euphemism for the vast apparatus pushing junk science on vulnerable children and confused families—it came as a much-needed slap in the face.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Test Scores Take Another Dive As Schools Pocket $Billions

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/31/test-scores-take-another-dive-will-anyone-be-held-accountable/

Another year, another disastrous National School Report card, the annual checkup on American students’ test scores. Yes, it’s bad. After predictably plunging during the COVID school-shutdown years, scores show no signs of snapping back. This is child abuse on a national level.

Our good friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity succinctly summed up the past five years: “The massive, unprecedented infusion of federal funds into schools under the guise of COVID recovery has abjectly failed to improve outcomes – but it has enriched the teacher unions.”

Yep. And the test scores remain abysmal, with no improvement. Average reading scores for 8th graders (America’s future workforce, mind you) have fallen from 263 in 2019 to 258 in 2024, erasing 33 years of slow improvement in reading.

Math is just as bad, if not worse. True, the 274 level is the same as in 2022, but it’s way below the level five years ago.

Worst of all, those at the bottom of the education performance race are getting worse, while a small cohort at the top are improving. This continues a trend, which began during the Obama administration.

“In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act,” explained Chad Aldeman, an education writer at The 74 website. “Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.”

“No Child Left Behind”? Try “Most Children Left Behind.” Lower standards equals lower test scores. It’s that simple. You can expect the future gap between rich and poor to widen.

“If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy,” noted a CNN piece in 2023.

This is a deadly serious problem. One calculation, made early in the COVID era, forecast a $2 trillion cumulative loss of income for America’s 50 million schoolkids; another more recent report estimated that “(s)tudents on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income depending on the state in which they attended school.”