Was San Francisco Election Official Not Rehired Because He Wasn’t ‘Diverse’ Enough? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19171/san-francisco-discrimination

The City of San Francisco is a state actor that is constitutionally prohibited from disqualifying job applicants on the basis of race. That is precisely what occurred here, despite the phony claim that Arntz can reapply for his job.

There is one important benefit to the San Francisco decision — at least as compared to university admissions decisions. The San Francisco panel did not try to disguise the racial criteria they are employing, whereas most universities go to great length to deny that race alone is often a dispositive factor in ranking applicants. This will make it easier for the courts to hold Arntz’s firing as a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In the bad old days, race was often used to discriminate against Black applicants. Today race is often used to discriminate in favor of Black applicants. I guess that is some sort of progress. But real progress will be achieved only if and when race is no longer a factor that trumps meritocracy. Only then will Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of how his children and ours should be judged become a reality.

John Arntz has held the job of San Francisco’s director of the Department of Elections for two decades. He has been repeatedly praised for his excellent performance at this increasingly important job — important because of so many election challenges and doubts. Just two years ago, the election commission commended him for his “incredible leadership.” But now they are essentially firing him because he is apparently of the wrong race to satisfy their “racial equity plan.”

Was Trump Our Captain Queeg? And will the NeverTrumpers finally be exposed to have been as contemptible as the NeverQueegers were in The Caine Mutiny? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/27/was-trump-our-captain-queeg/

The Left, the NeverTrump Right, and many independents are tiring of Donald Trump’s recitations of prior, however justified, grievances at the hands of the media, the Democratic Party, the administrative state, and hard-core Left.

The conventional wisdom runs that Trump’s whines and victimization recitations reveal deep paranoias, and increasingly to an obsessive degree. We are told that his near neurotic obsessions with the unfairness of his critics are alienating the independent voter, who finds Trump’s strolls down 2020-21 memory lane the same-old, same-old ad nauseam.

True, Trump’s occasional recklessness contributed to many of his misadventures. At least at some point, friendly critics suggest, he might have realized that his nationalist/populist agenda, his orphaned outsider status, his lack of prior political experience, and his estrangement from the Republican political hierarchy, bipartisan Washington, D.C. media and government fixtures gave him no margin of error—despite what prior presidents and our current commander-in-chief have been accorded.

The haters would have hated Trump regardless, But his tweets and ad hominem retorts served to disguise their peremptory venom while instead highlighting his own retaliatory crudity.

“Fact-checkers” doted on every Trump statement, nitpicking them to find some exaggeration, or untruth. Fine. But then these same hypercritics simply went comatose during the Biden Administration, with little care that Biden spins fantasies daily, from a son lost in the Iraq War to insulting claims that he passed his student loan amnesty in the Congress by a close vote, and on and on. With Trump, voters got real achievement with coarseness, with Biden utter failure with near senility.

The media lied about supposed felonious behavior of the two Trump sons during the Russian collusion mania. The same reporters snoozed when Hunter Biden all but served up a guilty writ of felonious behavior on his laptop. Yet Hunter and the Biden accomplices were given de facto exemption by the Department of Justice and “50 former intelligence officials” who were willing to lie about the laptop’s authenticity rather than risk the chance of seeing Trump reelected.

The coup-attempt party By David Zukerman

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/the_coupattempt_party.html

A political light bulb went on regarding Adam Schiff’s remark on CNN’s “State of the Union” as reported by Breitbart’ s Pam Key.  In the interview, Schiff again mentioned the Russia hoax he has promoted for five years, if not longer.  (Note that Dana Bash did not call Schiff on this huge lie.).  With Schiff continuing to assert this gross falsehood, the Democrat Party has, for years, switched from being a loyal opposition party to priding itself as a party of the permanently-attempted coup.

How dumb of me not to have taken seriously the Democrat cries of “Resistance,” as of the Trump inauguration, January 20, 2017 — but I then understood such cries to be figurative and fanciful references of a politically romantic nature.

But where were the Republican political experts like House Speaker Paul Ryan back in early 2017 when the “Resistance” was gearing up?   Alas, the anti-Trump Ryan was silently supporting the Resistance.  How could the Democrats have succeeded with the Mueller probe if Ryan had spoken out forcefully against what was apparently a coup attempt to oust the legitimately-elected president?

CNN published a list of Democrats who announced that they would boycott the Trump administration.  The late Rep. John Lewis, citing, in effect, the Russia hoax, refused to accept President Trump’s legitimacy.  Rep. Zoe Lofgren accepted the fact Trump was president, but still, would not attend his inaugural, and went on to become one of the Nine Members of the phony-baloney House Select Committee Against President Trump.

If the GOP House leadership did not recognize, five years ago, that it was opposed by the coup-attempt party, the leadership has no excuse now for failing to see the Democrats for the permanent coup-attempt party they have become.  And how well to understand, now, that when the Democrats accused Russia of “sowing chaos and discord” in the U.S., the Democrats were (falsely) projecting their own bad conduct.

Some Will Run, and Some Will Stay By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/some_will_run_and_some_will_stay.html

A lot of clear-eyed, hardworking, patriotic Americans are down in the dumps right now.  Understandably so.  The midterms were an utter disappointment.  Midnight mail-in ballot hauls have completely upended elections, transforming almost certain MAGA victories in Arizona and elsewhere into uphill legal battles likely to suffer slow strangulation in Establishment-coddling courts.  If America had properly functioning democratic elections where only legal citizens voted secretly and securely after first establishing their identification, Republicans would have a hundred-seat margin in the House.  Instead, centrist dullard McCarthy will “lead” a threadbare majority ripe for rancor and future Democrat flipping.  

In the Senate, globalist shill Turtle McConnell succeeded in manipulating Alaskan election law to ensure that despicable Democrat Lisa Murkowski — and not Alaskans’ actual Republican nominee — retained her aristocratic sinecure in the U.S. Senate.  Predictably, after corporate Republicans’ “little tent” electioneering shenanigans, a red state that President Trump won by over ten percent in 2020 now has a Democrat representing it in the House and Leftist Lisa reinstalled for six more years of conservative backstabbing in the Senate.  What fetid nonsense RINO, Inc. hath wrought!

In a remarkable display of chutzpah (even by their own insane standards), the same Uniparty Republicans that went out of their way to tank “America First” campaigns of outsider candidates by choking their funding and turning a blind eye to Democrats’ extensive mail-in ballot manipulations then turned around to blame lackluster results on the energetic base of MAGA Americans who actually outvoted the Democrats by millions across the country.  When Paul Ryan (whose 2012 campaign ticket with holier-than-thou, prissy patrician Romney lost a winnable election to Obama by more than five million votes) argues that he and his kind of corporate sycophants should take back the party from Donald Trump and the New Republicans’ MAGA coalition (who won fifteen million more votes than any other Republican candidate in history — and ten million more than Obama’s 2012 total!), then Ryan’s RINO rump obviously lives obliviously in cloud cuckoo land, where cuckservatives’ delusions of stale grandeur still reign supreme!

When Journalists Become Speech Police Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/when-journalists-become-speech-police/

Too many in the media now seek to neuter free expression in the name of saving it.

EXCERPTS

Call it Cooke’s First Law: Whatever the story, however complex its details, members of the American press will react by announcing who must be forbidden to speak going forward.

That is what too many journalists are now — not firefighters, not mediators, not conveyors of vital information, but zealous obscurantists staffing would-be censorship agencies. In comes the news, and, within minutes, out comes the latest justification for shutting everyone up. A mentally ill homeless man attacks Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer? That’s the Republican Party’s fault for running political ads against Pelosi — and it must stop. A disturbed man shoots up a gay club in Colorado Springs, Colo.? That’s the fault of Americans who object to drag shows for kindergartners — and they must be quiet. Elon Musk plans to moderate Twitter with a lighter hand? That will cause “havoc” and put lives at risk — and it must be prevented at all costs.

Worse still is the grotesque tendency for members of the press to cast their transparently self-serving determinations as raw scientific truths. It’s not the opinion of NBC, Axios, or the Washington Post that Twitter would be better left as is; it’s a fact — as determined by the “experts.” That these “experts” have been repeatedly proven to be full of it — remember when the entirely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian disinformation campaign,” and therefore needed to be suppressed just before the election? — seems not to matter. Nor, indeed, does it seem to matter that a great many of our arbiters of truth are rank hypocrites and contemptible lunatics. The temptation to cast one’s preferences as fact is a remarkably strong one, and, for now at least, many modern journalists seem entirely incapable of resisting it.

How else might one explain the contemporary New York Times, which has gotten into the infuriating habit of simultaneously contributing to, and complaining about, America’s “speech problem”? Earlier this year, the Times’ editorial board complained that “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” This development, the editors concluded, was the inevitable product of “the political left and the right” being “caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.”

Which . . . well, would that, by any chance, be the “condemnation and recrimination” of which the Times is routinely guilty itself?

School Choice Tremors Too many children are still stuck in government-run schools – with few options. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-choice-tremors/

The election on November 8th was good for the school choice movement. As Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, explains, 76% of candidates supported by his organization won their election. Govs. Kim Reynolds (IA), Chris Sununu (NH), Kevin Stitt (OK), Bill Lee (TN) and Greg Abbott (TX) were victorious after making school choice a centerpiece of their campaigns.

In Florida, where there are four different private options for families, Gov. Ron DeSantis annihilated Charlie Crist, who drew a distinct line in the sand when he chose the president of Miami’s teachers union as his running mate. DeSantis not only won by almost 20 percentage points, he outperformed Crist by 13 points with Latino voters, according to exit polls. This should not come as a surprise, as 38% of students using the state’s largest private-school choice program are Hispanic.

While the above governors are all Republicans, some victorious Democrats had become education freedom advocates. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was elected governor after campaigning hard for school choice. Also, Illinois J.D. Pritzker found religion and supported his state’s tax credit scholarship program during his campaign.

But the choicers weren’t the only ones claiming success on November 8th. After the election, the National Education Association crowed, “Educators, Parents, Students Won Big in Historic Midterm Elections.”

NEA President Becky Pringle triumphantly asserted, “Parents and voters explicitly rejected extreme politicians who engaged in the politics of division, politicizing our classrooms, banning books, dragging their culture wars into our public schools, and pushing failed privatization schemes.”

Former CIA Analyst on CNN: ‘This Freedom of Speech is Just Nonsense’ Revealing yet again what leftist elites really think of our Constitutional freedoms. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/former-cia-analyst-on-cnn-this-freedom-of-speech-is-just-nonsense/

Former CIA analyst and current CNN intelligence and security analyst Robert Baer appeared on CNN on Friday in order to explain to us all how very terrible it is that Elon Musk is beginning to restore the freedom of speech on Twitter. As it turns out, rolling back Twitter’s usefulness as a tool for the Leftist establishment’s propaganda and allowing dissident voices once again to be heard is just playing into the hands of the Left’s all-purpose bogeyman, Vladimir Putin. That’s right: if the Left loses its hegemony over the American public discourse, Ukrainians will die. That’s what passes for analysis today on CNN, and apparently in the CIA as well.

Maintaining a straight face, Baer declared: “Putin is going to be all over Twitter if there’s no regulations on this, fake accounts, spoofed accounts, the rest of it. This is a great opportunity for him. And so when he’s talking about the popular voice, Musk, he’s really talking about Russian intelligence. Um, you know, the Russians are waiting for something like this. They need a propaganda campaign against the United States and against our support for Ukraine, and they’re gonna be all over Twitter. I guarantee this. Supporting the far right, plans, demands to stop arming Ukraine. Just wait.”

Asked about how to discern truth from “disinformation,” Baer answered: “Well, that’s why the pre-Musk Twitter had 7,000 people going through these accounts. You can pick ‘em out with algorithms, you can pick ‘em out by looking at ‘em, uh, you can check IP’s and the rest of it. And you simply block ‘em. And it’s, it’s, it’s not right. And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense ‘cause you can’t go into a movie theater and yell ‘fire.’ It’s against the law. And what Putin’s gonna to do and the Russians, is they’re going to use this as a vehicle to, to save himself in Ukraine. And, y’know, whether it’s gonna work or not, I don’t know, but we’re gonna see, as soon as these restrictions come off, we’re gonna see the Russians all over, as I just said.”

The Trump Special Counsel is Another Clinton Payback Biden’s DOJ picks a career hack with a record of going after conservatives. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-trump-special-counsel-is-another-clinton-payback/

When Bruce Wasserstein, a billionaire backer of the Clintons, provided a $25 million donation to Harvard Law, future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, then serving as dean, welcomed it. The gift built on the Wasserstein Fellows Program already established at Harvard Law which brought “outstanding public interest lawyers” to Harvard and provided them stipends of up to $24,000 to meet with and influence students toward social justice at the prestigious law school.

When Jack Smith became a Wasserstein Fellow, even while, unironically, serving as head of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, seemingly soliciting and accepting a

grant funded by a leftist billionaire (but who watches the integrity of the head of the Public Integrity Section) he joined a list of leftist activist lawyers working for the ACLU, Earthjustice, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Soros’ Open Society, Catholic Charities and the UN.

The mission of the Wasserstein Fellows was to gather “a diverse group of accomplished public interest lawyers who are enthusiastic about sharing their passions with law students on how to utilize their legal education to promote social justice.” Those passions included illegal migration, letting criminals get away with committing crimes and dismantling America.

How the DOJ’s Jack Smith would go about promoting social justice was a question that was answered twice. At least twice in public view where everyone could see and hear it.

The latest came when Attorney General Garland picked Smith as the Special Counsel to go after Trump. But before that anyone wondering what Jack Smith did to be chosen as a social justice lawyer would have had to be paying close attention to the IRS scandal that took place a year before he was made a Wasserstein Fellow.

Crowd angered by lockdowns calls for China’s Xi to step down Huizhong Wu

https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-health-fires-social-media-50d7515e5fae00f5054062209e9306cc?utm_

SHANGHAI (AP) — Protesters angered by strict anti-virus measures called for China’s powerful leader to resign, an unprecedented rebuke as authorities in at least eight cities struggled to suppress demonstrations Sunday that represent a rare direct challenge to the ruling Communist Party.

Police using pepper spray drove away demonstrators in Shanghai who called for Xi Jinping to step down and an end to one-party rule, but hours later people rallied again in the same spot. Police again broke up the demonstration, and a reporter saw protesters under arrest being driven away in a bus.

The protests — which began Friday and have spread to cities including the capital, Beijing, and dozens of university campuses — are the most widespread show of opposition to the ruling party in decades.

In a video of the protest in Shanghai verified by The Associated Press, chants against Xi, the most powerful leader since at least the 1980s, and the Chinese Communist Party sounded loud and clear: “Xi Jinping! Step down! CCP! Step down!”

Three years after the virus emerged, China is the only major country still trying to stop transmission of COVID-19. Its “zero COVID” strategy has suspended access to neighborhoods for weeks at a time. Some cities carry out daily virus tests on millions of residents.

How the Biden admin quietly converts illegal immigrants into legal ‘parolees’ By Stephen Dinan

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/27/how-biden-converts-illegal-immigrants-legal-parole/

Maria Esperanza Diaz Ruiz had expected to pay a smuggler to get across the U.S.-Mexico border. Then she learned that the Biden administration’s new program would let her walk into the country at no cost as long as she had a tale of woe from back home.

She is one of the migrants taking advantage of a Biden policy that is converting illegal immigrants into legal “parolees,” a status that offers a work permit and a foothold in the U.S., according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which observed Ms. Diaz Ruiz and others.

“This is real,” she told the center’s Todd Bensman. “This is not a magic trick.”

Her justification for gaining parole, she said, is that she worked for a Nicaraguan government official who was homosexual. Her ex-husband threatened her and her boss, she told Mr. Bensman.

“I had to leave because I would be killed,” she said.

Armed with documents and a criminal background check, she joined a group of roughly two dozen migrants who were entered into the U.S. border authorities’ system, driven to the border crossing between Mexicali and Calexico, California, and turned over to federal authorities.

Mr. Bensman got unfettered access to Mexico’s side of the processing and published his findings last week.

He said crossings are not just at ports of entry along the border. Some immigrants are flown from Cancun or Monterrey directly into U.S. airports.

“This looks to be part of a purposeful strategy to create workarounds to court-ordered expulsion policies but also to reduce politically painful illegal crossing statistics by channeling ever more people through these legalized crossings,” he said. “While neither DHS nor the White House has publicized this legalized entrance program, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly telegraphed it in his oft-stated intentions to create ‘legal pathways’ as part of the administration’s overarching ‘safe, orderly, and humane’ vision for southern border immigration.”

The program relies on Mr. Mayorkas’ power of “humanitarian parole.” The secretary can admit people into the U.S. outside of the usual systems for temporary or immigrant visas.