The Black (Student) Body On the perils of racial self-segregation.Jason D. Hill

https://americanmind.org/features/inclusive-exclusion/the-black-student-body/

This is a response to an excerpt from A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, edited by Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild.

As Peter Wood observes, the notion of academic and cultural “inclusion” was presented as a response to performance disparities between blacks and whites in the 1980s. It has, however, morphed into codified cultural essentialism. “Inclusion” now means assuming a monolithic view of black culture, and judging black students by black standards only.

In accepting the idea that “blacks” as a whole have a distinct and separate culture which must be protected from the incursions of mainstream American values, universities effectively declared that blacks must separate themselves from the prevailing mainstream culture in order to escape racism. What has followed is a distinct pattern of racial self-segregation across America in pedigree universities and even smaller liberal arts colleges.

This neo-segregation has only become more institutionalized since the ’80s. This year, New York University opened negotiations with students to create black resident floors on campus. A group called “Black Violets NYU” has complained that the overwhelming presence of white students makes it difficult for black students “to connect.” Black Violets therefore wants a “themed engagement floor” for black students, as well as more black professors in NYU’s politics department and a black student lounge on campus.

In June of last year, students at Rice University demanded that the University fund a “non-residential Black House” on campus. They also wanted a statue of the university’s founder removed. Other demands included that new black students be able to request and receive black roommates, and that course descriptions have tags indicating which race and ethnic groups are involved in the course material.

Perverting “Civics” The Left is laying the foundation for an insurmountable advantage in the battle of ideas on basic American values. Kenin M. Spivak

https://americanmind.org/salvo/perverting-civics/

The Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress are infusing critical race theory (CRT), so-called anti-racist (in reality, profoundly racist) teachings, and other progressive ideologies into K-12 curricula. With forceful support from progressive states, there is a coordinated assault at all levels of our educational system to indoctrinate children and professionals in far-left anti-America rhetoric. If this effort succeeds—it is making spectacular progress—our country’s values and future are in jeopardy.

The advocates of CRT and related progressive principles have spent years planning and readying their takeover of our institutions. By dominating departments of education, accreditation agencies, university administrations, professional licensing organizations, and teacher unions, they have been able to mandate ideological training at each level of education, and then coerce compliance as a condition of employment, promotion, and appointment to governing boards.

Anyone who objects is shunned as a white supremacist, and suspended or terminated for insubordination or failure to comply with conditions of employment. The institution defends its suppression of academic freedom and free speech by pointing to its accreditation and licensing obligations, and the admission requirements of universities to which its students typically apply. While the Left may suffer an occasional setback in local elections or court, over time, this strategy will ensure the implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which is the immediate goal of CRT.

The success and prospects for this intricate strategy deserve respect, and fear. If conservatives and moderates do not use every lawful lever of power remaining to break the progressive chokehold, there soon will be no place to turn. Even in red states, the national accrediting and licensing requirements will do devastating damage and perpetuate a cultural civil war.

Emails Surface More Evidence Hillary Clinton Paid For Anti-Trump Disinformation Operation Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/29/emails-surface-more-evidence-hillary-clinton-paid-for-anti-trump-disinformation-operation/

Evidence continues to mount that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to launder fraudulent opposition research through U.S. intelligence agencies.

Newly published internal emails reveal that before Fusion GPS hired Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Donald Trump, the opposition-research firm began peddling several of the same Russia collusion lies that the former MI6 agent would later detail in the Steele dossier. This fact highlights a significant aspect of the Spygate scandal that deserves further focus and condemnation: Democrats’ outrageous exploitation of intelligence credentials and connections to launder scurrilous accusations against a political enemy.

Since early 2018, when the then-Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes exposed in a four-page memorandum evidence that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act during the 2016 presidential election cycle, Americans open to reality have been slowly learning of the breadth of the Spygate scandal.

Attention during this time rightly focused first on FISA abuse and the FBI’s use of unverified “intel” to obtain a court order to surveil former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. As the scandal continued to unravel, the categories of impropriety multiplied, from deep-staters illegally leaking to the media to build the collusion narrative and later to force the appointment of a special counsel, to the selection of the “right people” in the form of rabid partisans to staff the Crossfire Hurricane team.

Another underlying aspect of the scandal only became clear recently with the prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. Proceedings in Special Counsel John Durham’s false statement criminal case against Sussmann reveal Democrats paid credentialed individuals connected to U.S. intelligence agencies to pass, to both the press and the government, invented evidence of Trump colluding with Russia.

Should we be alarmed by Biden’s new Disinformation Governance Board? By Rajan Laad

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/should_we_be_alarmed_by_bidens_new_disinformation_governance_board.html

” Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board — the strongest argument against its existence is that no government has the authority to sit in judgment on the First Amendment rights of its own citizens. The Democrats are getting more brazen with every passing day.It is now up to the GOP to aggressively challenge the Democrats and prove to the voters that they are worthy of their trust and votes in November.”

Ever since Elon Musk announced his intentions to buy Twitter, the reaction from liberals has been nothing short of a meltdown.

When Musk actually clinched a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, the meltdown morphed into a full-scale implosion.

The primary cause of the outrage was Musk’s pledge to defend free speech:

Most of the anger emanated from the Washington Democrat establishment and spread like wildfire elsewhere.

Musk recently added a caveat to his assertion about free speech, saying it has to be within the realm of the law.

Biden’s Ministry of Truth By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/bidens-ministry-of-truth/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

A federal speech czar? Just as the Founders imagined it, no doubt.

Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress that his agency is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat “misinformation” coming from Russia as we near this year’s midterm elections. The Biden administration’s new Committee on Public Information will be led by Nina Jankowicz, “a disinformation fellow” who, perfectly enough, comes to the administration from a think tank named after Woodrow Wilson. Like Wilson, Mayorkas, himself a font of untruths, does not explain under what constitutional power he proposes to oversee speech.

It gets tedious to point this out, but you can vividly imagine the thermonuclear meltdown the country would be (rightly) subjected to if a Republican president assembled a government panel tasked with weeding out “disinformation.” To our technocrats’ dismay, this isn’t Europe, where the state can dictate allowable speech and sometimes arrests those who don’t abide. Here, citizens are the ones who call out the state for peddling misinformation, not the other way around.

The pro-censorship Left, which is to say the vast majority of contemporary Democrats, now have Barack Obama on board as well. The one-time neoliberal champion of free speech — a freedom he employed aggressively to mislead the American people when it served his partisan interests — alleged during a recent Stanford University speech that “people are dying” from misinformation. And, you know, if censorship can save one life . . .

Indeed, these arbiters of truth not only happen to be some of the same people who ran around repeating ludicrous conspiracies about foreign interference for five years; they’re also the same people who used the menace of “Russian disinformation” to lie and suppress news that undermined their electoral prospects, as they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story. (That crew, you’ll be surprised to learn, includes Czarina Jankowicz.)

FBI Conducted Millions of Warrantless Searches of Americans’ Data in 2021: Report By Arjun Singh

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-conducted-3-4-million-data-record-searches-in-2021-according-to-report/

The FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of data in the U.S. without a warrant over the year 2021, according to a new government report.

The Annual Statistical Transparency Report, was published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Thursday and focuses on the intelligence community’s use of national security authorities for surveillance under U.S. law.

The information was previously gathered by the National Security Agency, the U.S. military’s signals intelligence agency, but was transferred to the civilian-led FBI per the U.S.A. FREEDOM Act, passed in 2015.

The figure represented a 260 percent increase from the previous coverage year, 2020, where the FBI had conducted around 1.3 million searches.

According to analysis by the Wall Street Journal, more than half the data searches – 1.9 million – pertained to the FBI’s investigations of attempts by Russian hackers to infiltrate and sabotage critical U.S. infrastructure. This included the investigation of the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, a 5,500-mile pipeline from Texas to New York, which was shut down by Russian hacking group “DarkSide” in exchange for ransom in May of 2021.

The shutdown briefly prompted emergency fuel rationing measures by the Department of Energy across the northeastern United States.

Though a version of the same report has been published every year since 2014, this marks the first time that an accounting of the number of data acquisitions by the FBI has been undertaken. At a press briefing in Washington on Friday, an FBI official admitted that “3.4 million is certainly a large number. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t.”

Team Biden finally admits there’s a war on cops — which it’s inflaming By Heather Mac Donald

https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/team-biden-finally-admits-theres-a-war-on-cops/

The Biden Justice Department is finally acknowledging the war on cops: FBI Director Christopher Wray denounced the 59% increase in cop murders in 2021.

An officer is murdered nearly once every five days, yet violence against law enforcement “doesn’t get enough attention,” Wray said Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

That is an understatement. Wray’s bosses — Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden — have instead focused almost exclusively on alleged white-supremacist criminality, which they claim is the biggest domestic threat facing the country today.

That charge is preposterous. It is violent street crime — drive-by shootings, sadistic robberies, carjackings — that has been destroying lives at an increasing rate since the George Floyd race riots. White-supremacist violence played no role in the record-breaking 29% national homicide increase in 2020 or in the ongoing crime surge since then.

As startling as that 2020 homicide increase was, cop murders rose at twice that rate in 2021. A significant portion of those fatalities were ambushes, which were up 91% by mid-2021. Through April 26 of this year, gun murders of cops are up another 13% over the same period in 2021. Shootings of officers, lethal and nonlethal, were up 43% by early April.

These cop killings emerge from a national rhetoric of cop hatred and racial animosity. The Floyd riots and their long aftermath featured the graffiti tag ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) sprayed across public buildings from New York City to Seattle.

Biden’s new ‘misinformation czar’ is a Hunter laptop denier Fox guarding the henhouse much?Stephen L. Miller

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/hunter-laptop-denier-jankowicz-biden-disinformation-board/

The Biden team is following in Barack Obama’s footsteps by launching a Disinformation Governance Board. And the current administration is even one-upping the former president by employing the Department of Homeland Security to combat what it calls “misinformation.”

Obama created a website in 2011 called “Attack Watch” to counter what his 2012 campaign would label as smears and lies. In 2013, his surrogate Stephanie Cutter was appointed head of his Organizing for Action “Truth Team.” Just last week, Obama waded back into the debate about “disinformation” without any sense of self-awareness or irony.

Biden’s disinformation board is, however, less forthcoming with its own information. Will the department have cabinet members? Must its directors be approved by Congress? Who knows? The Biden administration sure isn’t saying.

The Disinformation Governance Board already has a director. Politico reports that Nina Jankowicz has been tapped to help the Biden White House counter what it calls “misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”

The problem is that Jankowicz has her own history of trafficking disinformation. In October 2020, for instance, she tweeted:

In the same month, she again tweeted about Hunter’s laptop, writing:

It’s been confirmed, of course, not only by the New York Post, which broke the original story, but also by the Washington Post and New York Times, that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails are real and not a product of Russian misinformation.

Ignorance And Apathy: Cal Thomas

https://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2022/04/28/ignorance-and-apathy-n2606424

There’s an old joke about a fictitious poll taker who asked people what they thought about ignorance and apathy when it comes to politics and elections. One respondent said, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

I thought of that joke after seeing a recent YouGov poll. It shows a vast gap between what people believe to be true and what is verifiably true.

Here are a few examples. According to the poll, transgender individuals make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population, yet people believe the estimated proportion is 21 percent. Only about 1 percent of U.S. households earn more than $500,000 a year, but the survey shows respondents believe 26 percent earn more than that amount.

Three percent of the U.S. population identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, but the survey shows people think the figure is 30 percent. The Black population of the country is 12 percent, but people surveyed think it is 41 percent. Hispanic? The actual number is 17 percent, while the perception is 39 percent. It is the same for atheists: 3 percent (actual) vs. 33 percent (perception).

What accounts for this vast disparity between perception and reality? It can only be the news and entertainment media and what they choose to highlight, as well as the bias they bring to subjects and issues they seek to promote, denigrate, or ignore.

As James Freeman recently noted in The Wall Street Journal: “The current custom in journalism holds that legislation sponsored by Democrats carries the title preferred by Democrats, while a Republican-sponsored bill carries the title preferred by Democrats.” He cites President Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal, which is about raising taxes and increased spending. The media call the measure by his preferred label. Compare that to “Florida’s new law shielding 7-year-olds from state-sponsored gender identity,” which the media and activists insist on labeling the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

A post-Holocaust question: Why does the war against the Jews continue? Those who support Palestinianism want something very simple—another Holocaust. Moshe Dann

https://www.jns.org/writers/moshe-dann/

The defeat of the Nazis in World War II ended the Holocaust, but the war against the Jews continued. Muslims and the British administration in Palestine sought to prevent Israel’s establishment, and in 1948, five Arab armies invaded the newly established Jewish state with the intention of wiping it out. Egypt, Syria and other countries planned to attack again in 1967, but were stopped when Israel launched a preemptive strike. The war against the Jews still went on, however, led by the PLO and, more recently, Hamas and other terrorist organizations.

Although the Nazis were defeated and condemned, their anti-Jewish ideology was adopted by Palestinian leaders, institutions and terrorists. It is explicit in the PLO Covenant and the Hamas Charter, broadcast daily by Palestinian media and taught in Palestinian schools.

Most people, however, don’t understand what Palestinianism is. They think it’s about the desire of a group of people for a homeland, a state and self-determination. It’s not. It’s about destroying Israel. Attempts to satisfy Palestinian demands and efforts to engage in a “peace process” inevitably fail when they confront this reality.

Palestinianism is based on the Palestinian narrative that Israel has no right to exist and that the Jews stole their homeland. In doing so, goes the narrative, the Jews expelled Palestinian Arabs during the war of 1948, most of whom moved to neighboring countries. These refugees have been cared for ever since as “refugees” by the U.N. agency UNRWA in order to perpetuate the Palestinian concept of the “the Nakba” (catastrophe)—that is, Israel’s existence. Over the ensuing decades, Arabs and their supporters have demanded that Israel withdraw to the 1949 Armistice lines, evacuate Jews from areas which the IDF acquired in 1967 and allow all Arabs who are considered refugees—and their descendants—to return to Israel and reclaim their property in what is called “the right of return.”