Police Arrest Over 100 Protesters At Emerson College As Pro-Palestinian Protests Flare Across Country thumbnail

Police Arrest Over 100 Protesters At Emerson College As Pro-Palestinian Protests Flare Across Country

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By The Daily Caller

Boston Police Department (BPD) arrested over 100 pro-Palestinian protesters Wednesday evening at Emerson College, the Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed.

Students have been protesting since Sunday and created an encampment in an alleyway partially owned by the college despite being warned that they were in violation of city ordinances, according to CBS News Boston. Police made a total of 108 arrests and broke up the encampment after warning protesters again to leave the area, a BPD spokesperson told the DCNF.

“108 arrests, 4 injured officers, 3 minor, 1 more serious. All non-life threatening,” the spokesperson said. “No protestors in custody have reported injuries at this time. Protestors will be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court.”

I’m near Emerson College in Boston right now where Boston Police are arresting dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters.

Arrested protesters are chanting “we keep us safe!” from inside a paddy wagon, as those on sidelines chant along. pic.twitter.com/Cw0gzmh2mY

— Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs (@NickAtNews) April 25, 2024

The department did not elaborate on whether the protesters had been released or what they were being charged with. The school has not made a statement on the arrests but classes were canceled Thursday, according to CBS News Boston.

The administration urged protesters in a statement Wednesday to abide by city laws and clear out the encampment, according to an announcement to the school.

“Most notably, the Commissioners expressed that the tents occupying Boylston Place Alley violate city ordinances prohibiting tents in a public right-of-way,” the announcement reads. “They also noted alleged violations involving blocking pedestrian access to the alley, public noise violations, and ongoing reports of fire hazards posed by blocking doors and hydrants. These are not Emerson College rules but laws and ordinances enforced by the city and the commonwealth.”

The college also noted that it had received reports that there had been “targeted harassment and intimidation of Jewish supporters of Israel and students, staff, faculty, and neighbors seeking to pass through the alley” from protesters and that this behavior was “unacceptable,” according to the school’s announcement.

Pro-Palestinian protests have been erupting across the country following the arrest of nearly 100 students at Columbia University who were protesting the school’s ties to Israel. Multiple groups at Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others, have started encampments, calling for the universities to meet their demands to boycott, divest and sanction Israel over its war with Hamas.

Hamas launched an attack on Israel on Oct. 7 killing over 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostages, including Americans.

Emerson did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

KATE ANDERSON

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Prime Minister Netanyahu: ‘Campus Antisemitism Reminiscent of 1930s Germany’ thumbnail

Prime Minister Netanyahu: ‘Campus Antisemitism Reminiscent of 1930s Germany’

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By The Geller Report

“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific.” — Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel.

Netanyahu: ‘Campus antisemitism reminiscent of 1930s Germany’

The Prime Minister condemned the antisemitic incidents and protests currently occurring on university campuses in the US and called on administrators to stop them.

By: Israel National News, Apr 24, 2024:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video in English on Wednesday in which he condemned the anti-Israel and antisemitic rallies currently being held in universities in the United States.

“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful,” the Prime Minister stated.

With this, he noted that “fortunately, state, local, and federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done. It has to be done not only because they attack Israel, that’s bad enough, not only because they want to kill Jews wherever they are, that’s bad enough, it’s also when you listen to them, it’s also because they say not only, ‘Death to Israel. Death to the Jews,” but “death to America.’ And this tells us that there is an antisemitic surge here that has terrible consequences.

“We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians. Yet it is Israel that is falsely accused of genocide, Israel that is falsely accused of starvation, and all sundry war crimes. It’s all one big libel. But that’s not new. We’ve seen in history that antisemitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander, lies that were cast against the Jewish people that are unbelievable yet people believed them.”

Netanyahu added: “Now, what is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough. We have to stop antisemitism because antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine. It always precedes larger conflagrations that engulf the entire world.

“So I ask all of you, Jews and non-Jews alike, who are concerned with our common future and our common values to do one thing: stand up, speak up, be counted. Stop antisemitism now,” he concluded.

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can’t Be Controlled thumbnail

Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can’t Be Controlled

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By Frits Byron Soepyanfbs

Editors’ Note: The global warming crowd would like nothing better than to convince you that we are in a climate crisis and that they need to grab COVID-like emergency powers to dictate how you live your life. If it were not for the sinister nature of the movement, which wishes to control everything from the way we cook, drive, eat, our power sources, and the like, it would be amusing that they think their efforts to curtail C02, amidst all the other independent variables that are completely out of their control, can create what they imagine as the perfect climate.  They will fail to meaningfully change the climate but they may well succeed in taking our freedom, destroying all economic prosperity and impoverishing Americans.

NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.” Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?

“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”

In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.

For instance, a major influence of weather and climate is solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.

Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex. Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.

In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.

The Milankovitch cycles also involve obliquity, or the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted. The tilt is why there are seasons, and the greater the Earth’s tilt, the more extreme the seasons. Larger tilt angles can cause the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, as each hemisphere receives more solar radiation during summer and less during winter.

Finally, the rotating Earth, like a toy top, wobbles slightly on its axis. Known as precession, this third Milankovitch cycle causes seasonal contrasts to be more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other.

Moving from outer space to Earth, ocean and wind currents also affect the climate.

For instance, during normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean, trade winds blow from east to west along the Equator, pushing warm surface waters from South America towards Asia. During El Niño, the trade winds weaken and the warm water reverses direction, moving eastward to the American West Coast. Other times, during La Niña, the trade winds become stronger than usual, and more warm water is blown towards Asia. In the United States and Canada, these phenomena cause some regions to become warmer, colder, wetter, or drier than usual.

In addition to El Niño and La Niña, there is also the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is driven by low air pressure in the North Atlantic Ocean, near Greenland and Iceland (known as the sub-polar low or Icelandic low), and high air pressure in the central North Atlantic Ocean (known as the subtropical high or Azores High). The relative strength of these regions of low and high atmospheric pressures affects the climate in the Eastern United States and Canada and in Europe, affecting both temperatures and precipitation.

Similarly, Hadley cells are the reason Earth has equatorial rainforests that are bounded by deserts to the north and south. Because the Sun warms Earth the most at the Equator, air on either side of the Equator is cooler and denser. As a result, cool air blows towards the Equator as the warm, less dense equatorial air rises and cools, releasing moisture as rain and creating lush vegetation. The rising, drier air reaches the stratosphere blowing north and south to settle in regions made arid by lack of atmospheric moisture.

These and other phenomena influencing our climate are well beyond the control of humans.

*****

This article was published by The C02 Coalition and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

As the University of Arizona Goes, so Goes Tucson thumbnail

As the University of Arizona Goes, so Goes Tucson

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By Craig J. Cantoni

As the University of Arizona goes, so goes Tucson, the city where the university is located.

As Tucson goes, so goes the University of Arizona (UA).

Things haven’t been going very well for either of them. Both have been operating well below their potential for a long time, and both are suffering from problems that are largely self-inflicted.

UA is having a financial crisis, a leadership crisis, and a morale crisis among faculty and administrative staff. And, as will be discussed momentarily, it has been surpassed reputationally by other state universities, including land-grant colleges like itself.

The City of Tucson has high poverty and what comes with poverty: crime, human misery, blight, and low K-12 test scores. The surrounding county isn’t much better.

The Tucson metro area of nearly 1.1 million people is an economic backwater compared to many other Sunbelt metropolises, including compared to Phoenix, the megapolis a two-hour drive north on Interstate 10. This is in spite of Tucson having a milder climate and a prettier natural setting than Phoenix.

It hasn’t helped Tucson that UA has been a laggard in commercializing innovations and spinning off startups that have grown into high-paying enterprises.

An aside: In the spirit of leveling with the reader, I have connections to the University of Arizona. My son has done well from earning a bachelor’s and master’s in engineering from the university, and a former provost at the university was a client of my management consultancy while she was at UA and then while she was at another university.

I have lived and worked in big cities, small cities, corrupt cities, rich cities, impoverished cities, declining cities, and rising cities. Tucson tops all of them in provincialism, insularity, hubris, denial, and an aversion to prosperity.

Tucsonans take pride in their kindness, humanism, and concern for the disadvantaged. At the same time, paradoxically, they have embraced a governing ideology, a controlling political monopoly, and corresponding public policies that have hurt people by keeping the metropolis poorer than it would otherwise be.

The University of Arizona has similar traits.

Consider UA’s search for a new provost. Of the three finalists, one has taken a post elsewhere, and another was lambasted by faculty.

Curiously—or maybe it isn’t so curious—the rejected candidate had a track record of cutting costs, which would seem to be a top requirement given UA’s financial woes. But when he gave a presentation to faculty members, he apparently didn’t recite the correct platitudes and banalities about the disadvantaged, especially about so-called Hispanics.

According to a story in the Arizona Daily Star, over 100 faculty signed a letter bashing the candidate for his “very odd and concerning response” about being a provost at a “Hispanic serving institution.”

(Source: “U of A faculty members endorse 1 provost candidate, bash another,” by Ellie Wolfe, Arizona Daily Star, April 17, 2024.)

The above story further quoted the faculty letter as follows: “Our sense is that he has neither an understanding of nor a commitment to the values that define us as a land grant, and that constitute important areas of strategic opportunity and competitive advantage.”

The newspaper story went on to explain:

Hispanic serving institution is a federal designation by the U.S. Department of Education of universities with 25% or more total undergraduate Hispanic student enrollment.

Land grant universities, established by law in 1862, were initially created to teach agriculture, science, and engineering. Now, the universities provide education, research, and outreach meant to benefit their communities and address societal needs. The UA is one of 57 land grant universities in the country.

That’s almost laughable, considering that the politics and policies at the university and in the city have done little to reduce poverty and make metro Tucson more prosperous.

An aside: To level again with the reader, I earned two degrees long ago at a university that had a large Mexican student body. (They referred to themselves as Mexican back then, not Hispanic, just as I referred to myself as Italian, not White.) My Mexican buddies and I were in ROTC together and went through officer basic training and artillery training together. I also lived in the barrio of San Antonio, where I had my car stolen, my rims stolen another time, and got caught in the middle of a gun battle.

Contrast my experience with the provost candidate preferred by the UA faculty. She is a dean at Pennsylvania State University, located in State College, Penn., where Hispanics comprise four percent of the population. Yet the aforementioned letter from UA faculty said that they were impressed with her “commitment to the values of diversity and engagement of community that are central to our identity as a Hispanic serving institution and a land-grant university.”

If it sounds like blather, looks like blather, and smells like blather, it might be blather.

Speaking of blather, it’s particularly “blatherous” when university faculty talk about their commitment to community. It’s difficult to find a work environment more cutthroat, backstabbing, petty, and status-conscious than universities.

In addition to the search for a provost, another search has begun at UA to replace President Bob Robbins, who has announced his retirement date. It is critical for the future of UA (and Tucson) that the right person be found, but it’s difficult to be optimistic in view of past leadership.

The reputation of UA has suffered under its leaders while the reputations of other universities have shined under their leaders.

A case in point is Purdue University, the land-grant college in tiny West Lafayette, Indiana. News coverage abounds about how the recently retired president of Purdue, Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, had frozen tuition, improved the school’s already stellar reputation, established collaborative relationships with large corporations, and built a research park that has just attracted SK Hynix to construct a $4 billion advanced semiconductor fab and packaging plant.

Imagine what such a facility would do for the reputation of UA and for poverty in Tucson. It would do a lot more than the current blather is doing.

Daniels also had groomed his replacement. He has been replaced by Dr. Mung Chiang, the former dean of engineering and executive vice president for strategic initiatives.

Purdue receives special recognition in the New York Times bestseller, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, by Frank Bruni. The book decries the obsession of parents to get their kids into one of the Ivy League colleges and makes the case that there are plenty of excellent schools outside of the Ivy League. In addition to Purdue, another land-grant university, Texas A&M, is recognized in the book.

Only one university gets an entire chapter in the book: Arizona State University, which is located in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe. ASU President Michael Crow is lauded for changing the reputation of the university from a party school to a school of excellent academics. Corporations have ranked it as one of the top five sources of qualified graduates.

By contrast, the University of Arizona receives two brief references in the book. One reference is about a student who passed through UA and then went on to earn a degree at a more prestigious university. Another is about a student who attended UA’s School of Architecture but then applied her architectural knowledge to her true love of the theater, where she got her start by designing stage sets in New York.

In closing, perhaps Tucson and the University of Arizona deserve each other. But Tucson residents and UA students don’t deserve their provincialism, insularity, hubris, denial, and blather.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

A Coup Without Firing a Shot thumbnail

A Coup Without Firing a Shot

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By Jeffrey Tucker

The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the intellectual, mental, and psychological.

The first level has presented a chaotic narrative of the previously unthinkable. A killer virus that turned out to be what many people said it was in February 2020: a bad flu with a known demographic risk best treated with known therapeutics. But that template and the ensuing campaign of fear and emergency rule gave rise to astonishing changes in our lives. 

Social functioning was wholly upended as schools, businesses, churches, and travel were ended by force. The entire population of the world was told to mask up, despite vast evidence that doing so achieved nothing in terms of stopping a respiratory virus.

That was followed by a breathtaking propaganda campaign for a shot that failed to live up to its promise. The cure for the disease itself caused tremendous damage to health including death, a subject about which everyone cared intensely before the shot and then strangely forgot about after.

Protests against the goings-on were met with media smears, shutdowns, and even the cancellation of bank accounts. However, and simultaneously, other forms of protest were encouraged, insofar as they were motivated by a more proper political agenda against structural injustices in the old system of law and order. That was a strange confluence of events, to say the least.

In the midst of this, which was wild enough, came new forms of surveillance, censorship, corporate consolidation, an explosion of government spending and power, rampant and global inflation, and hot wars from long-running border conflicts in two crucial regions. 

The old Declarations of rules on the Internet put free speech as a first principle. Today, the hosting website of the most famous one, signed by Amnesty International and the ACLU, is gone, almost as if it never existed. In 2022, it came to be replaced by a White House Declaration on the Future of the Internet, that extols stakeholder control as the central principle.

All the while, once-trusted sources of information – media, academia, think tanks – have steadfastly refused to report and respond in truthful ways, leading to a further loss of public trust not just in government and politics but also in everything else, including corporate tech and all the higher order sectors of the culture.

Also part of this has been a political crisis in many nations, including the use of sketchy election strategies justified by epidemiologic emergency: the only safe way to vote (said the CDC) is absentee via the mails. Here we find one of many overlapping parallels to a scenario hardly ever imagined: infectious disease deployed as a cover for political manipulation.

Crucially and ominously, all of these mind-blowing developments took place in roughly similar ways the world over, and with the same language and model. Everywhere people were told “We are all in this together,” and that social distancing, masking, and vaxxing was the correct way out. Media was also censored everywhere, while anti-lockdown protestors (or even those who simply wanted to worship together in peace) were treated not as dissidents to be tolerated but irresponsible spreaders of disease. 

Can we really pretend that all of this is normal, much less justified? The exhortation we receive daily is that we can and must.

Really? At what point did you realize that you had to start thinking for yourself?

We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.

That leads to the second layer of comprehension; the intellectual, mental, and psychological. Here is where we find the real drama and incalculable difficulties.

At the dawn of lockdowns, what appeared to be a primitive public health error seemed to be taking place. It seemed like some scientists at the top, who gained an implausible amount of influence over government policy, had forgotten about natural immunity and were under the impression that it was good for health to stay home, be personally isolated, avoid exercise, and eat only takeout food. Surely such preposterous advice would be revealed soon as the nonsense it was.

How in the world could they be so stupid? How did they gain so much influence, not just nationally but all over the world? Did the whole of humanity suddenly forget about all known science in every field from virology to economics to psychology?

As time went on, more and more anomalies appeared that made that judgment seem naive. As it turns out, what was actually taking place had something to do with a move on the part of security and intelligence services. It was they who were given rule-making authority on March 13, 2020, and that’s why so much of what we needed to know was and is considered classified.

There were early initial reports that the virus itself might have been leaked from a US-backed lab in Wuhan, which introduces the entire subject of the US bioweapons program. This is a very deep rabbit hole itself, thoroughly exposed in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up. There was a reason that topic was censored: it was all true. And as it turns out, the vaccine itself was able to bypass the normal approval process by slipping through under the cover of emergency. In effect, it came pre-approved by the military. 

As the evidence continues to roll in, more and more rabbit holes appear, thousands of them. Each has a name: Pharma, CCP, WHO, Big Tech, Big Media, CBDCs, WEF, Deep State, Great Reset, Censorship, FTX, CISA, EVs, Climate Change, DEI, BlackRock, and many more besides. Each of these subject areas has threads or thousands of them, each connecting to more and to each other. At this point, it is simply not possible for a single person to follow it all. 

To those of us who have been steeped in following the revelations day by day, and trying to keep up with putting them together into a coherent model of what happened to us, and what is still going on, the ominous reality is that the traditional understanding of rights, liberties, law, business, media, and science were dramatically overthrown in the course of just a few months and years.

Nothing operates today as it did in 2019. It’s not just that functioning broke. It was broken and then replaced. And the surreptitious coup d’etat with no shots fired is still ongoing, even if that is not the headline. 

Of this fact, many of us today are certain. But how common is this knowledge? Is it a vague intuition held by many members of the public or is it known in more detail? There are no reliable polls. We are left to guess. If any of us in 2019 believed we had our finger on the pulse of the national mood or public opinion generally, we certainly do not anymore.

Nor do we have access to the inner workings of government at the highest levels, much less the conversations going on among the winners of our age, the well-connected ruling elites who seemed to have gamed the entire system for their own benefit. 

It’s so much easier to regard the whole thing as a giant confusion or accident on grounds that only cranks and crazies believe in conspiracy theories. The trouble with that outlook is that it posits something even more implausible; that something this gigantic, far-reaching, and dramatic could have happened with no real intentionality or purpose or that it all fell together as a huge accident.

Brownstone Institute has published more than 2,000 articles and 10 books exploring all over the above topics. Other venues and friends are out there helping us with this research and discovery, issue by issue. Even so, a great deal of responsibility falls on this one institution, the main work of which is providing support for dissident and displaced voices, which is implausible since it was only founded three years ago. We are deeply grateful for our supporters and would welcome you to join them.

As for the intellectuals we once revered for their curiosity and wisdom, most seem to have gone into hiding, either unable to adapt to the new realities or just unwilling to risk their careers by exploring hard topics. It’s understandable but still tragic. Most are happy to pretend like nothing happened or celebrate the change as nothing but progress. As for journalists, the New York Times publishes daily commentaries dismissing the Constitution as a dated anachronism that has to go and no one thinks much about it.

There is a lot to sort out. So much has changed so quickly. No sooner than the dust seems to be settling from one upheaval, there is another and then another. Keeping up with it all causes a level of psychological brain scramble on a scale we’ve never previously experienced.

It’s easier to wait for the historians to tell the next generation what happened. But maybe, just maybe, by stepping up and telling the story as we see it in real time, we can make a difference in stopping this madness and restoring some sane and normal freedom back to the world.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Roughly Half of Gen Z Voters ‘Are Sympathetic to Hamas’ thumbnail

Roughly Half of Gen Z Voters ‘Are Sympathetic to Hamas’

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By Family Research Council

Last weekend, multiple anti-Semitic protests broke out on college campuses including Ohio State University, Columbia University, and Yale University. The demonstrators tore down American flags, chanted about the death of Israelis and praises of the October 7 attacks, as well as some injuries and arrests. Ever since the war between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas broke out, intense targeting of Jews in the U.S. sparked as well.

Initially, people questioned whether the anti-Semitism was new or simply uncovered by the Hamas terrorist attack. But now, as more protests occur, many worry that colleges have become a breeding ground for not only leftist agendas at large, but also for much of this resurgence of Jewish hatred. Considering the amount of anti-Semitism displayed on college campuses in recent months, the news that a survey found roughly half of Gen Z voters “are sympathetic toward Hamas” is, for many, not a shock.

Summit Ministries and RMG Research released data on Monday showcasing “the startling difference between the sentiments of all voters and Gen Z voters specifically, those born between 1997 and 2012,” Breitbart reported. These particular results, which involved 1,003 registered voters, highlighted Gen Z’s terrorist sympathies with the label, “Landmark poll: Gen Z sides with Hamas.”

The respondents were asked, “Do you believe that Israel’s wealth and military power make its campaign against Hamas unjust?” According to Breitbart, “While most voters across the board, 58 percent, believe that Israel’s campaign is ‘just’ — compared to 21 percent who believe it is unjust — only 42 percent of voters aged 18-24 believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is just. A plurality of voters aged 18-24 believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is unjust,” Breitbart reported. This is despite the fact that roughly 60% of Gen Z voters “agree with the U.S. government classifying Hamas as a terrorist group.”

The survey also revealed that “one-third of Gen Z voters believe Israel does not have the right to exist as a nation. Across the board, just ten percent hold that same sentiment, showcasing the radicalization of America’s youth.” Comparatively, a Pew Research Poll from March found “roughly six in ten Americans (58%) say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid,” even if they did not all agree with how Israel responded to Hamas.

However, even though the majority of the U.S. voters appear to side with Israel amid the war, the poll from Monday made it unmistakenly clear that almost the majority of young voters do not.

Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, shared with The Washington Stand, “When colleges and even primary and secondary schools are educating their students in the ‘oppressor/oppressed’ paradigm, it’s little wonder that Gen Z will identify with Hamas as indigenous and believe that Israel is a ‘colonizing’ force.”

She continued, “We know that this is totally and biblically inaccurate, but this is a generation that has been formed by social media very profoundly where these ideas are pervasive.” As such, it leads to “a situation where there is very little downside for being a pro-Palestine protestor on a college campus in most states,” especially considering the fact that “universities have policies where they provide the police force and the court system to meet their need for (social) justice.”

Unfortunately, Kilgannon concluded, “this horrific situation is sadly not surprising.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

France: Young Jewish Girl Kidnapped, Raped Migrant Messaged Her Mother That He Was Going to Prostitute Her “For Palestine”

WATCH Biden Praise AOC’s Vile Defense of Violent Anti-Jewish Pogroms on University Campuses

Columbia President’s on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’

Expel and Deport Ivy League Terrorists

Columbia University: Protestors Call Jews ‘Pigs’ As Qur’an Says

RELATED PODCAST: The Struggle Between Liberty and Authority

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Where Is the Safe Space for Jews? thumbnail

Where Is the Safe Space for Jews?

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By Family Research Council

A recent trend on college campuses is to install “safe spaces,” places where students — or certain identity-group subsets of students — can go to feel safe. These safe spaces are exclusionary by design; they protect students by insulating them. In extreme cases, safe spaces have been deemed to cover entire campuses, leading to the exclusion or disinvitation of undesirable visitors.

This “safe space” trend has been rightly ridiculed for its tendency to protect college students’ feelings from exposure to opposing viewpoints. Such exposure serves to sharpen the mind and used to be college’s main virtue. Thus, protecting students from “harm” by sequestering them from intellectual diversity undermines the whole point of college education.

But the silly “safe space” trend adopted the language of harm and safety because those are important considerations. Sticking with the collegiate context, students can’t devote themselves to their studies if they take their life in their hands every time they walk across campus. Fertilizing their mental acreage is orders of magnitude more difficult when outside sounds like a warzone, or a rock concert, or both at the same time.

The safety of college campuses — most of whom have a department devoted to preserving it — is often taken for granted, else loving parents would think twice before sending sweet Suzy off to a dormitory. Basic physical safety should be a guarantee on which all students can rely, regardless of their background. Unfortunately, that guarantee is no longer universal.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

On Sunday, Rabbi Elie Buechler of Columbia University’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) strongly recommended that Jewish students “return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved.”

“The events of the last few days, especially last night, have made it clear the Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme anti-Semitism and anarchy,” wrote Buechler. “It is not our job as Jews to ensure our own safety on campus. No one should have to endure this level of hatred, let alone at school.”

Last Thursday, anti-Semitic activists took over Columbia University’s central quad, turning it into a tent city overnight. The activists, many of whom are students, have praised Hamas’s military arm Al-Qassam, called for the destruction of Israel, and openly invited the killing of counter-protestors. Despite more than 100 arrests on Thursday, the rabble have only grown bolder.

Now, university administrators appear to have given up any hope of reasserting control of their campus property. The rabbi’s counsel to Jewish students was “the reason why classes went virtual at Columbia today,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, said Monday on “Washington Watch.” By Tuesday, Columbia University announced it was switching to hybrid classes for the remainder of the semester.

“There was one professor, Shai Davidai, who was having none of it,” Menken continued. “He said, ‘I am bringing 10 students and alumni with me Monday morning. We’re going to go on to the campus. We’re going to go right into the middle of that anti-Semitic demonstration, and we insist you keep us safe.’”

Rather than keep him safe, “Columbia deactivated the access card of their professor,” Menken related in disbelief. “Professor Shai Davidai of Columbia University had his access card deactivated by the university to prevent him from interfering with the anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas demonstration at that campus.” Columbia University COO Cas Holloway personally appeared at the campus gate to prevent Davidai from entering the.

Davidai is an assistant professor in Columbia Business School’s Management Division, and he also leads Columbia’s anti-Semitism task force. Columbia administrators had to know that barring the head of the anti-Semitism task force from campus would provoke outrage, yet they chose to confront the backlash rather than confront the unruly mob that has taken over their campus. “Columbia was confronted with a clear choice either the anti-Semitic barbarians or the Jews. They expressly chose the anti-Semitic barbarians,” exclaimed Menken. “The entire administration of Columbia is utterly compromised by Jew hatred.”

Where is the safe space for Jews?

Certainly not at Columbia University, nor at Yale. Sahar Tartak, a Jewish student at Yale who is also a conservative reporter, was physically assaulted and blocked by protestors while attempting to film the pro-Hamas demonstration — which included taking down an American flag on a university flagpole — at that university. After demonstrators surrounded and blockaded her, a keffiyeh-garbed man stabbed Tartak in the eye with a Palestinian flag he carried.

At this point, the terrorist groupies aren’t even pretending to be motivated by non-violent, humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians. “Anti-Semitism is always about finding a façade, a pretense, and then moving on to their end goal, which has always been ethnic cleansing and genocide,” argued Menken. “They were never anti-Israel protests. They were always anti-Semitic protests that glorify terrorism, that glorify atrocities, actual beheading of babies and rapes and holding hostages. These are not decent human beings.”

Where is the safe space for Jews?

You won’t find one at MIT, NYU, University of Michigan, Ohio State University, UC Berkeley, or Boston University. I’m sure that’s only the tip of the iceberg, since the anti-Semitic protests have reached even smaller, lesser known schools like Cal Poly Humbolt or UNC Charlotte.

At this point, it seems like American Jews are safest anywhere that isn’t a college campus. But that’s obviously not a workable solution in the long run. Today’s students are tomorrow’s lawyers, bankers, and politicians — not to mention professors. Are American Jews simply supposed to accept a second-class status, where they don’t get to go to college and are governed by those who hate them? How well did that work in 1930s Germany? If Jews aren’t safe on American college campuses, then ultimately they won’t be safe anywhere else in America.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

Jews could perhaps find a safe haven on other shores. But a cursory glance around the world shows the same violent anti-Semitism on shameful display in American universities. Judging by U.N. voting records, America sits near the top of the list of pro-Jewish countries. If Jews can find few countries friendlier than the U.S., and they are hated here, where can they go?

Where is the safe space for Jews?

The obvious exception is the world’s only Jewish-majority nation-state (although two million Arabs also live there peacefully), the postage stamp-sized parcel of seacoast known as Israel. Established in 1948 in response to the Holocaust, the modern state of Israel has provided a safe haven for persecuted Jews of every nationality.

Yet Israel’s Jews are not safe even within their own paper-snowflake borders. Hamas proved that on October 7, 2023, when they launched an unprovoked invasion on a Jewish holy day, slaughtering more than 1,200 Jews, kidnapping more than 200 prisoners, burning, raping, and pillaging wherever they could. Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group supported by America’s geopolitical adversary Iran, openly calls for Israel’s “annihilation” and has broadcast its intention to repeat its October 7 attack as often as it is capable.

Hamas is not Israel’s only threat. Hezbollah, another Iran-backed terror group, operates out of Israel’s northern neighbor Lebanon, and it has kept up frequent rocket barrages against Israel to divide its attention. “There are, I believe, about 80,000 Israelis who can’t go home every night because the rockets being shot in by Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) remarked on “Washington Watch.” “Obviously Israel cannot permanently tell 70 or 80,000 of their citizens, ‘you can’t go home at night.’”

Behind these groups lies Iran, a global terror sponsor, which is close to developing a nuclear weapon and is avowedly committed to Israel’s destruction.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

But perhaps the campus mobs openly supporting Hamas are ignorant of Hamas’s goal and merely want American Jews to return to Israel. If that were true, they would also have to be ignorant of the words coming out of their own mouth.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free,” they chanted. That’s a strange twist on their classic, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” By “free,” they mean free of Jews. By “from the river to the sea,” the chant invokes (and confuses) the boundaries of the land God promised to give to Israel in Deuteronomy 11:24, “from the River, the River Euphrates, to the western sea.” The technical term for seeking to drive all people of a given ethnic group out of a given territory is “ethnic cleansing.”

Again, they chanted, “There is only one solution: intifada, revolution.” “One solution” echoes the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish problem”: extermination camps. Intifada and revolution — both terms for riots or armed uprisings — are the means by which this chant proposes to achieve its end: the annihilation of all Jews everywhere.

No, the protestors know very well what unthinkable barbarity these chants call for. They share the end of Hamas.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

The utmost irony is that these disgraceful displays of anti-Semitism were sparked by the attack on Israel. When most sovereign nations suffer an unprovoked attack by an international terrorist outfit, they receive universal acknowledgements of sympathy, solidarity, and solace, even from parties who usually maintain a frosty distance. But when Israel was attacked, that outrage provoked not only sympathy for Israel but also expressions of solidarity with those who attacked her — even before Israel had mounted any military response.

This has led some Jews, even non-Zionists, to the inevitable conclusion that Israel’s demise would only result in further attacks on Jews everywhere. “The idea that Jews can be safe anywhere if they’re not secure in Israel has just been shattered,” said foreign policy expert Caroline Glick. “It’s very clear that the security of all Jews everywhere is contingent on Israel defeating our enemies in Israel.”

Under the Biden administration, Israel’s closest and most powerful friend is working overtime to snatch that rightful victory away from them. If that happens, it will lead right back to the question we’ve been asking all along.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Remembering the Passover in Troubled Times

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Why Young Men and Women in America ‘Have Every Reason To Be Outraged!’ thumbnail

Why Young Men and Women in America ‘Have Every Reason To Be Outraged!’

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By Dr. Rich Swier

“For the first time in our nation’s history, a 30 year old isn’t doing as well their parents were at 30. They see exceptional wealth across my generation… and we’re running it up on their credit card.” — Scott Galloway

We have been warning for over a decade that there is a war being waged in America against our youth. From kindergarten, to trade school, to college, to university our children are not being taught the skills to make them healthy, happy and prosperous.

Add to this the growth of bigger and bigger government from the city to the county to some states and to Washington, D.C. politicians have put up more and more roadblocks that have kept our youth from being prosperous. From getting a job, to purchasing an automobile to buying an home, government has piled on more and more regulations, higher taxes, added mandates that keep our young from achieving what their parents did.

Scott Galloway, bestselling author, NYU professor, and co-host of the Pivot podcast, has published a new book titled

is a must-have guide to optimizing our youth’s lives for wealth and success. Click here to read the introduction to the book.

Watch Scott on MSNBC explain why our youth are suffering.

Today’s workers have more opportunities and mobility than any generation before. They also face unprecedented challenges, including inflation, labor and housing shortages, and climate volatility. Even the notion of retirement is undergoing a profound rethink, as our life spans extend and our relationship with work evolves. In this environment, the tried-and-true financial advice our parents followed no longer applies. It’s time for a new playbook.

In The Algebra of Wealth, Galloway lays bare the rules of financial success in today’s economy. In his characteristic unvarnished, no-BS style, he explains what you need to know in order to better your chances for economic security no matter what. You’ll learn:

  • How to find and follow your talent, not your passion, when making career decisions.
  • How to ride and optimize big economic waves (hard truth: market dynamics always trump individual achievement).
  • What small steps you can take that pay big returns later, including diversification and tax planning.
  • How stoicism can help you minimize spending and develop better financial habits.

Bursting with practical, game-changing advice from one of the world’s most popular business school professors, The Algebra of Wealth is the practical guidebook you need to win today’s wealth game.

WATCH: The Algebra of Wealth | The Prof G Show

ABOUT SCOTT GALLOWAY

Scott Galloway is a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. A serial entrepreneur, he has founded nine firms, including L2, Red Envelope, and Section4. He’s the author of many best-selling books, including, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning, and most recently, .

Watch this extensive interview with Scott Galloway with Ryan Hawk host of the The Learning Leader Show.

©2024. All rights reserved.

POSTS ON X:

MUST WATCH:

Clip of the year by Scott Galloway

“For the first time in our nation’s history, a 30 year old isn’t doing as well their parents were at 30. They see exceptional wealth across my generation… and we’re running it up on their credit card.”pic.twitter.com/fEsHFVc4Y4

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) April 24, 2024

NEW: Jewish NYU professor Scott Galloway blasts the double standard of the anti-Israel protests, says he would be fired if he said “l*nch the blacks or b*rn the gays.”

“I can tell you, if I went into the NYU square with a white hood on and said, ‘l*nch the blacks or b*rn the… pic.twitter.com/0NI6NlNTf6

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 24, 2024

Columbia University’s President on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’ thumbnail

Columbia University’s President on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’

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By The Geller Report

Who hired her? Why hasn’t she been fired?

The leftist/Islamic cabal, a.k.a. Red/Green Alliance, has hijacked every major institution, government agency, and legacy media outlet in the cause of America’s ruin and destruction.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Columbia University’s current president, Minouche Shafik, sparked controversy by referring to terrorism as ‘a form of protesting’ during an event just two months later.

This statement has ignited a heated debate on social media, with various users questioning the implications of such a characterization and expressing a range of opinions from outrage to support. The discussion has touched on broader themes of terrorism, its victims, and the perception of protest in the context of violent acts.

WATCH: Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik call the 9/11 attacks a ‘form of protest’ just two months after thousands of Americans were killed.

Columbia’s president called the 9/11 attacks a form of protest just two month after thousands of Americans were killed. pic.twitter.com/9uDWY5aYMh

— @amuse (@amuse) April 22, 2024

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: France: Young Jewish Girl Kidnapped, Raped Migrant Messaged Her Mother That He Was Going to Prostitute Her “For Palestine”

RELATED VIDEO: Qatari official explains the intention to murder the world’s Jewish population

POST ON X:

Her appeasement fueled a violent antisemitic mob. President Shafik must resign.

Retweet if you AGREE!@NYpost pic.twitter.com/7bq84qttda

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) April 23, 2024

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Just a Disaster’: Biden’s Title IX Rule Empowers LGBTQ Movement, Erases Women and Justice thumbnail

‘Just a Disaster’: Biden’s Title IX Rule Empowers LGBTQ Movement, Erases Women and Justice

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By Family Research Council

The Biden administration’s revision of a civil rights statute designed to protect women’s rights in education erases women’s protections, rewrites landmark civil rights legislation to advance the LGBT agenda by federal fiat, and waters down legal standards for those falsely accused of sexual harassment.

The Biden administration obliterates the unique rights intended for women and girls by claiming Title IX’s prohibitions of discrimination against females in education apply to men who identify as women — regardless of their outward appearance — as well as those who identify as homosexual. Its “unofficial final rule,” released on April 19, now claims LGBTQIA+ activists may cite protections intended for women to accuse their fellow students of discrimination based on “sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

The term “gender identity” appears 289 times in the 1,577-page document.

The new rule also requires that these “discrimination” allegations only meet the lowest standard of proof, known as the “preponderance of the evidence.” The rule — announced by Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights — also establishes “equitable grievance procedures.”

“They have completely demolished protections for women,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm last week. “It’s just a disaster.” The new proposed rule “impacts speech. It impacts a free and appropriate education.”

In a comment emailed to The Washington Stand, Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Rachel Rouleau called the new rule “a slap in the face to women and girls who have fought long and hard for equal opportunities.” The Biden administration’s “radical redefinition of sex turns back the clock on equal opportunity for women” and “will have devastating consequences on the future of women’s sports, student privacy, and parental rights.”

The Biden administration’s federal fiat — never approved by legislation — rolls back regulations instituted in May 2020 by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that reestablished legal norms and standards for those accused of sexual harassment.

Obama administration rules — also drawn up by Lhamon, a former ACLU attorney — allowed college sexual harassment investigations to be carried out by a single investigator, who acted as judge and jury. Vague definitions proscribing any “unwelcome conduct,” whether verbal or “nonverbal,” led school districts to punish students for unwelcome staring.

Under the Trump administration’s revised Title IX rules, anyone accused of sexual harassment on campus enjoyed the presumption of innocence, as in any other legal proceeding. The defendant also had the right to know the charges against him or her, examine all the evidence presented in the proceedings, have an adviser cross-examine any witness’s testimony, and appeal the ruling. The administration had to meet the more robust and normative legal standard of “clear and convincing evidence.”

At the time, Lhamon asserted that the Trump administration’s revised guidelines would make it “permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” No epidemic of unpunished campus rape followed.

The Biden administration’s new Title IX rule eliminates all these elements, which are standard in other consequential accusations.

“The final regulations restore and strengthen vital protections for students,” Biden’s Department of Education contended in a press release Friday.

All parties seem to acknowledge these rules will supercharge the number of sexual harassment cases on campus after it takes effect on August 1. “This rule is designed to encourage reporting,” a Biden administration official told journalists on a call Thursday.

Newly empowered with looser regulations, activist bureaucrats in the federal government, and on college campuses nationwide, “are going to enforce this rule, and they are going to enforce it aggressively,” predicted Kilgannon. “The Education Department laid down their marker and said, ‘Yes, indeed, you will face a penalty for this.’” States that refuse to implement the strategy will “be losing federal funds for your education programs in your state.”

Since more affluent areas, like the D.C. suburbs, rely more on property taxes to fund their schools, the threat of losing federal education dollars falls heaviest on the most vulnerable students living in underprivileged districts. “It is the poorest places who will be most harmed by this, because they rely the most on federal funding,” Kilgannon added.

To avoid running afoul of an activist bureaucracy’s interpretation of the newly broadened rule, education officials may shut down any speech that could turn into litigation, and threaten federal funding.

“This change reverses decades of progress toward equality, open discourse, due process, and parental rights,” observed the Southeastern Legal Foundation. The new rule will cause students to “self-censor rather than risk being reported for harassment” and “significantly undermines the role of parents — who should be the primary caregivers for their children and who are entitled to raise their children to share certain values and beliefs — by requiring conformity to the federal government’s views on biology and so-called gender identity.”

The regulations drew fire from Congress over these specific concerns. “Evidently, the acceptance of biological reality, and the faithful implementation of the law, are just pills too big for the Department to swallow,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee.

The new regulation pulls off a trifecta of administrative harm, as it “attacks the definition of sex, due-process rights, and free-speech rights,” said Inez Feltscher Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum.

The regulation also continues the decades-long trend of rewriting legislation through executive action. “Title IX was written in 1972 when ‘sex’ meant male and female, and no amount of interpretive jiujitsu permits a cabinet agency to rewrite the plain language of the law. Efforts to do so have failed repeatedly in Congress for one simple reason: Such an expansion of law is deeply unpopular, with opposition to these changes spanning both political and racial lines,” said Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, in a comment to TWS. Numerous polls have shown a supermajority of Americans oppose the extending of women’s rights to men, regardless of their self-identity.

“It is grotesque that the White House has chosen to capitulate to extremists in his party, sacrificing the First Amendment” in the process, Neily told TWS.

Women’s rights activists promise not to take the loss of their distinct place in the law lying down. “This is going to be the subject of lawsuits,” Kilgannon told Backholm, citing direct knowledge of multiple civil rights attorneys and organizations. Neiley told TWS explicitly, “This betrayal of students will not soon be forgotten by American parents, and we look forward to suing the administration over this policy soon.” Likewise, Rouleau told TWS that the “Alliance Defending Freedom plans to take action to defend female athletes, as well as school districts, teachers, and students who will be gravely harmed by this unlawful government overreach.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

An Overlooked Trump Cabinet Pick Could Upend The Left’s Grip On Power thumbnail

An Overlooked Trump Cabinet Pick Could Upend The Left’s Grip On Power

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By The Daily Caller

President Joe Biden summed up his education vision last year with a few words.

“There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children,” Biden said while honoring the 2023 teacher of the year.

Biden’s remarks triggered a firestorm among Republicans, education activists and parents alike.

Now those Biden critics are strategizing for a potential second Trump administration. Priorities have been outlined, shortlists have been drawn. Some are preparing to join the administration.

But it’ll be up to Trump to make his pick for the unheralded but critical cabinet spot of education secretary.

“It’s pretty much impossible to overstate the importance of the education secretary. Not just to Americans today, but to America’s future,” Angela Morabito, spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute, told the Daily Caller.

“It is not a secret that our country is falling behind while we’re spending more per student on education than nearly anywhere else on Earth. And yet, our results are mediocre to put it generously,” Morabito said.

There’s been no shortage of anonymously sourced conjecture on who might take other cabinet roles. But the Secretary of Education has flown under the radar despite being a hot-button issue for Republican voters — and a position that influences the future of the country in a way that’s unique from any other.

The issue of education has exploded into the spotlight during Biden’s term after accelerating at a slow burn during the Obama years, which prompted a pendulum swing under Trump. Conservatives now have a set of priorities ranging from reeling in Title IX to rooting out bias from academia and teacher training.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced students into their homes and onto their computers for months of remote learning. In the summer of 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked racial outrage throughout the country. In response, higher education institutions raced to affirm their anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bona fides.

The takeover runs deep — in just a handful of years of full-blown DEI capture of higher education, universities have churned out a generation of insubordinate anti-American bureaucrats, Orwellian tech overlords and a protester industrial complex. The ideological opponents of conservatives virtually all share one common trait: they were trained and equipped on American college campuses.

FLASHBACK: At an event just two months after 9/11, Columbia University’s current president Minouche Shafik remarked that terrorism “is a form of protesting” pic.twitter.com/UkSP4iqDZu

— Brent Scher (@BrentScher) April 22, 2024

Colleges and universities across the country implemented racial quotas, dropped standardized testing requirements and added segregated graduation ceremonies all in the name of DEI.

“I think, looking at all the DEI programs in higher ed is extremely important and starting to deny funds to colleges, who do the DEI programs. That way they either have to scale them back as we’re seeing some state schools doing like Texas and Florida, they’re scaling them back to stay there and try to hide the program or there’s abolishing the program altogether. But either one is incredibly important,” founder of the 1776 Project PAC, Ryan Girdusky, told the Daily Caller.

By 2023, the downstream effects of DEI and remote learning brought communities to a boiling point.

In K-12 education, a grassroots movement was born. Parents had become exposed to what their children were learning at school as lessons took place in the living room via Zoom. Concerned guardians cried out against critical race theory (CRT) lessons teaching students to value each other on the basis of their skin color. Communities sought to prevent their kids from being exposed to literature that could confuse them about sexuality and gender.

But it was too late. In K-12 education, students have fallen grade levels behind in math, reading and civics. Numerous jurisdictions have implemented policies allowing students to use bathrooms and join sports teams on the basis of their gender identity, rather than sex. Other K-12 schools host student clubs on the basis of race and themselves have implemented DEI initiatives.

“The idea of deconstructing, decolonizing math and decolonizing science are coming out of these teachers colleges, to get teachers who are just promoting critical theory in all its forms into K through 12 education. So the teachers colleges are essential place to look at,” Girdusky said.

The Biden administration has pushed many of the efforts rankling conservatives. The Department of Education has finalized a rule that would modify Title IX to protect students from discrimination on the basis of gender identity, a change that would allow boys — identifying as girls — to enter the ladies’ restroom.

On the higher education front, DEI policies have thrown out merit, experience and qualification, all things the nation’s universities were once highly renowned for. Student groups and activities on campuses have been divided into different racial groups. And in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, college students protested Israel at universities across America, in some cases threatening the lives of Jewish students.

Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz MaGill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth sat in front of Congress on Dec. 5, 2023, fumbling through attempts to condemn antisemitism and explain how their institutions had become a cesspool of hatred.

Here are @MIT students proudly chanting for the genocide of Jews in Israel:

They shout in Arabic: “From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab.”

MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, has resisted calls for her to resign for not protecting Jewish students.pic.twitter.com/FmIbVboUKj

— Shelley G (@ShelleyGldschmt) April 19, 2024

“Our schools can and should be the best in the world. And they’re not,” Morabito told the Daily Caller.

Gay was ousted from her position after conservative journalists and activists uncovered numerous instances of alleged plagiarism in her academic writings. One of those conservative education activists, Christopher Rufo, told the Caller he’d like to see the next education secretary pursue an aggressive anti-DEI campaign nationwide.

“I think the next education secretary should be very aggressive in withholding or even terminating expenditures to universities that don’t meet a basic standard of fairness, equal treatment and compliance with American civil rights law,” Rufo told the Daily Caller. “This would send shockwaves through the entire public and private university system and start getting some of these ideologues who have captured University bureaucracies to start thinking twice before they administer discriminatory and illegal programs, which they do flagrantly at the moment.”

He added the next education secretary should make it clear to universities that if their policies fall out of line with the administration’s priorities, funding will be stripped.

Transforming America’s education system to meet conservatives’ vision will require the right person running the Department of Education. Numerous current Republican elected officials and activists have interest in the job, if offered, the Daily Caller has learned.

“I think when the country calls you to service, you have to listen. And when the president is looking to assemble a team to advance these ideas, these principles and these policies, he’s going to need the best people he can get. And I think something like that would be an offer that would be very difficult, if not impossible to refuse,” Rufo told the Daily Caller about the education secretary job.

“Me, I would do it,” Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told the Daily Caller. “I think that there are a lot of other people that I’ve met over the past three years who would be willing to serve in the next administration for the purpose of putting the focus back on academic achievement and meritocracy across America.”

Moms for Liberty has grown into one of the most prominent grassroots organizations advocating for parental rights in the nation’s K-12 schools. Focused on school board races and policies enacted at the state level, Moms for Liberty has become known for its battle against age-inappropriate gender ideology lessons and the implementation of CRT.

Justice added that she has been working with a team of individuals through the parental rights movement that she thought would make good leaders in the education department for the administration, including Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds’ wife Erica.

Grassroots activists aren’t the only candidates to lead a potential Trump Department of Education. A who’s-who of elected Republican officials have the support of education groups that spoke to the Daily Caller, and there were indications some might be interested in the job.

One education group listed several current and former government officials on their shortlist for the position, including former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, former New Mexico Secretary of Education Hannah Skandera and Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley.

“From her perspective, it’s something that she is interested in,” a spokesperson for Reynolds told the Daily Caller.

“Is this satire?” said a former campaign aide for Sasse, who is still close with the now-President of the University of Florida.

Walters, who didn’t indicate whether he would accept the position himself, listed Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts, PragerU CEO Dennis Prager, Youngkin, former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Sanders as his ideal candidates.

“First, I will do everything I can to support and help get President Donald Trump reelected,” Walters told the Daily Caller about whether he would accept the education secretary role if offered.

“I am focused on my role to ensure Oklahoma schools are rid of woke indoctrination, liberal union strangleholds, and reawaken a love for our country. The focus must be on firing Joe Biden and ending the culture for hating America,” Walters continued.

Another Oklahoman, Gov. Kevin Stitt, is “open-minded” about the position, an operative in the state told the Caller.

“I don’t have a firm answer on a yes or no, that he would take it. I do know that his reason that he got into public policy was because of the vitriol he has for the Department of Education and his number one personal goal in life is to see it completely dissolved,” an adviser to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told the Daily Caller.

Though the Heritage Foundation doesn’t have a formal endorsement for who it would like to see in the administration, there are role models the organization thinks are good examples for the movement.

“I know we’ve had multiple conversations with a handful of the current state superintendents, who I wouldn’t on the record say these are people that we would recommend or who we’d like to see, but people like Ryan Walters in Oklahoma, Manny Diaz in Florida, Ellen Weaver in South Carolina,” Crystal Bonham, a senior advisor to Roberts in communications at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller.

“They’re all doing work that we have pretty much wholesale endorsed and someone with their kind of character and background that would be ideal, if not Dr. Roberts. Or Lindsay Burke, she’s phenomenal,” Bonham continued.

As for Youngkin, his camp suggested he is very focused on continuing his leadership in Virginia.

“He’s got a clock behind his desk, in his office, in the Patrick Henry building where the governor’s suites are. It’s a countdown clock, because it’s only four years, you can’t run for reelection. So you know, this would all be just speculation. I certainly haven’t heard it. And I don’t know of any conversations that have occurred, but I do know that that his focus is definitely on Virginia,” Zach Roday, a former political adviser to the governor, told the Daily Caller.

The governor’s spokesperson pointed to how proud Youngkin is of his education track record in a statement to the Daily Caller.

“He’s focused on doing that right here in Virginia during his remaining time as Governor,” Christian Martinez told the Daily Caller.

Others are looking back for the best path forward.

“Secretary DeVos would be fantastic — I can’t think of anyone better and more battle-tested for the job,” school choice activist Corey DeAngelis told the Daily Caller. “She would be able to continue the momentum she started when she was at the helm of the department last time. If she is not interested in stepping back from private life again, the next Secretary of Education should be someone who will show a similar commitment to students.”

DeVos provided the Caller with several priorities she would like to see in a second Trump administration, including school choice legislation and undoing changes to Title IX that the Biden administration is eyeing. DeVos did not indicate whether she’d return to her old job, or if she had discussed it with the Trump team.

The Biden Admin has just officially abolished Title IX as we knew it. Now, sex = gender identity.

In a nutshell, the new rewrite means:
– men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women
– men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc
– men could be… pic.twitter.com/JfQVI9Yfph

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) April 19, 2024

Girdusky was unsure who he would like to see in the education secretary role, noting that many contenders have a focus on school choice — a topic he thinks should be a priority but not a hyperfocus.

What the next Secretary of Education does will be even more critical than who it is. While right-leaning education advocates have been able to make progress against DEI policies and gender ideology, leading activists had different takes on what the department should prioritize if Trump takes the White House.

But rather than use federal power to enact change to the nation’s education system, some think the best solution is to get rid of what they consider to be the very problem.

“We need to dismantle the Department of Education,” Justice told the Daily Caller.

“Over the past 40 years that the federal government has really inserted its tentacles into every crack and crevice of American public education. And we need to tear it out root and branch so we are working at Moms for Liberty to ensure that we have a lot of advocacy at the state level. And in the counties where local control is so incredibly important,” she continued.

Justice added she wants to rid education of influence from outside agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In addition to dismantling the Department of Education, Walters told the Caller that he wanted the potential education secretary to drive DEI, CRT and transgender ideology out of schools, while also working to take down teachers’ unions.

Above all, Laurie Todd-Smith, director of America First Policy Institute’s Center for Education Opportunity, told the Daily Caller that she hoped a Trump education secretary would close the nation’s learning loss gap that students suffered after the pandemic. Todd-Smith also stressed the importance of undoing the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX.

Pandemic school closures didn’t stop the spread of COVID and resulted in high levels of learning loss for students. | By @BrighamTomco https://t.co/my6cKY1OqH

— Deseret News (@Deseret) April 14, 2024

In Texas, the state legislature has laid out the blueprint for using the government to rid universities of race-based initiatives, like Girdusky, Rufo and others have advocated.

Introduced by Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton in March 2023, Texas State Bill 17 quickly passed through the state legislature to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, where it was signed into law in June 2023. Under the legislation, an institution is not permitted to spend money appropriated to the institution for a state fiscal year until the Board of Regents submits to the legislature and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board a report certifying that it has complied with restrictions on DEI.

The Texas law bans DEI offices and initiatives at state-funded higher education institutions. The law also prohibits institutions from considering diversity statements from job applicants and bans mandatory DEI training for staff.

Now, Texas universities are facing consequences because of the law.

In April, the University of Texas Dallas laid off nearly two dozen of its DEI faculty in an effort to comply with the law, CBS News reported. The University of Texas at Austin eliminated 60 jobs and its Division of Campus and Community Engagement (previously called the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.)

While Justice and Rufo have priorities focused on their expertise, some education activists have a two-pronged approach in mind.

Girdusky said he hoped to see the future education secretary prioritize both K-12 learning loss while tackling issues in higher education.

“But really what there is, is there’s a two-step priority, one is going to be higher ed and the other one’s going to be lower education K through 12. A huge priority has to be to go after the teacher’s colleges. Because a lot of the problems that we’re seeing as far as education goes comes from teachers and colleges,” Girdusky told the Daily Caller.

In the same vein as Girdusky, Morabito expressed that the future education secretary should withhold funds from institutions or K-12 schools that engage in divisive activities.

“The first and the most powerful is federal civil rights law. It is unlawful for any federally-funded program or activity to discriminate based on race or sex, or perceived national origin. So federal funding should not be going to anywhere that discriminates based on sex or race or discriminates against the Jewish students based on shared national origin or perceived ancestry,” Morabito told the Daily Caller.

As for what Trump plans to focus on in a potential second administration, Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, pointed the Caller to the former president’s already-released education plans.

Under the former president’s priorities for a second administration are several education focused initiatives. To tackle higher education, Trump says he will “fire the radical Left accreditors” and impose standards to remove all “DEI bureaucrats.”

Trump also released his 12-step plan for K-12 education, which would include passing legislation to prioritize “curriculum transparency and a form of universal school choice.” The priorities note that Trump would “keep men out of women’s sports,” an indication that he would undo any changes the Biden administration makes to Title IX.

Several education groups and activists that the Caller spoke with said they had not had any engagement with the Trump campaign about their vision for education.

Leavitt referred the Caller to a December 2023 statement from advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita on media speculation over transition team efforts. The statement, Leavitt said, makes it clear “that outside groups do not reflect official campaign policy or strategy.”

“People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump…and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction,” the statement from Wiles and LaCivita reads. “Second term policy priorities and staffing decisions will not – in no uncertain terms – be led by anonymous or thinly sourced speculation in mainstream media news stories.”

“I think it’s very important that we need an education secretary who is youthful, aggressive, intelligent, and ruthlessly determined to shatter the status quo. And so, establishment figures will no longer make the cut, and even Trump’s ambitious policy agenda on education, he’s going to need a leader who can step in day one, with the courage to get things done,” Rufo told the Daily Caller, also noting that he has a very good relationship with the former president’s policy team.

Girdusky said he asked the Trump campaign about the position around the turn of the new year.

“He had not gotten the nomination at the time and it just wasn’t the biggest priority at the time, which it was probably like, January when I spoke to them, maybe December even. So the nomination process hadn’t even come up. And I was just talking about the idea of education secretary or whatnot, and they didn’t have a list of names. It was a very informal conversation,” Girdusky told the Daily Caller.

Three prominent education groups that the Daily Caller spoke to had not had much communication with the Trump campaign about the issue. DeAngelis, Defense of Freedom Institute and Freedom Works’ education initiative “B.E.S.T’ all told the Daily Caller that they had not spoken with the campaign about their priorities or their short list.

Roberts, while in touch with the Trump campaign regarding Heritage’s transition project, has not spoken with the campaign about serving in the administration himself, a senior adviser told the Caller.

“Not at this point. They do talk fairly regularly. Most of that has to do with Project 2025 and kind of general, kind of getting ready for the transition period. So at this point, they haven’t yet talked about specifics in terms of if he’d be willing to take a cabinet position or if that’s even been offered,” an adviser told the Caller.

The same could be said for Justice.

“I’m throwing my hat in the ring now. How’s that?” she said.

AUTHOR

REAGAN REESE

White House correspondent.

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At Yale, ‘Peaceful Protesters’ Hit Jewish Student in the Face with a Flagpole

Columbia University: Protestors call Jews ‘pigs’ and proclaim ‘We are Hamas’

Columbia University Descends Into Pure Racist Hatred

University of Michigan: ‘Freedom for Palestine means Death to America’

Yale: Police storm campus with riot gear, arrest students at pro-Hamas protest encampment

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Strips Away Protections For Women, Denies Women Equal Opportunity thumbnail

Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Strips Away Protections For Women, Denies Women Equal Opportunity

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By Editors of The Independent Women’s Forum

Editors’ Note: Democrats cast themselves as the party of “women’s rights”, while they actually are the party of unrestricted abortion to be paid for with public money.  We hope the knowledge of this most recent decision will change the minds of not only Arizona women, but women across the nation. By using school lunch money for extortion, they impose by bureaucratic non-democratic means the whole of the transgender agenda. No elected representative accountable to the people even got to vote on this. This is pure bureaucratic fiat, showing the grotesque nature of the Administrative State in action. They would rather take the food out of children’s mouths than listen to the public will, which overwhelmingly rejects this action. It defines women as nonexistent. And they will be doing this from the college level down to kindergarten. Wherever schools use Federal money, they will by the nature of the incentives adopt the program of the radical transgenders. This action by the Biden Administration will do great damage to the cause of female advancement, will harm and confuse our children, curtail the rights and prerogatives of parents, and severely damage the public school system. It needs to be fought aggressively and tenaciously. 

”Taking opportunities from women and giving them to men doesn’t enforce Title IX, it violates it. That was true before the Administration dropped this rule, and it is still true today.” – Jennifer C. Braceras

Today, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), the nation’s most impactful policy organization for women, condemned the Biden administration’s unlawful Title IX regulation, which unilaterally rewrites the landmark sex equality law and undermines women’s rights, and free speech, and due process. This new Omnibus Rule, which governs all aspects of the educational experience, turns Title IX on its head through extra-statutory regulations that require schools to allow males to self-identify into women’s spaces, opportunities, and athletics.

Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Law Center (IWLC) are preparing to sue the Biden administration to enjoin this unlawful action.

Announcing IWF’s lawsuits against the administration, May Mailman, director of Independent Women’s Law Center said, “Title IX was designed to give women equal opportunities in academic settings. It forbids discrimination on the basis of “sex,” which it affirms throughout the statute is binary and biological. The unlawful Omnibus Regulation re-imagines Title IX to permit the invasion of women’s spaces and the reduction of women’s rights in the name of elevating protections for “gender identity,” which is contrary to the text and purpose of Title IX. This is illegal, and we plan to sue.”

”Taking opportunities from women and giving them to men doesn’t enforce Title IX, it violates it. That was true before the Administration dropped this rule, and it is still true today,” added Jennifer C. Braceras, vice president for legal affairs at IWF and founder of IWLC. “The Department of Education can’t just rewrite the statute by administrative fiat. We are confident the courts will remind the Department of this basic principle and strike down this unlawful rule.”

By claiming that Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” a term never mentioned in the original statute, the Biden administration’s rewrite forces schools to let male who identify as women take women’s scholarships and invade women’s private spaces — including women’s athletic teams.

Polling reflects that 69% of Americans believe athletes should play on teams that correspond with their biological sex.

In an election year, the Biden administration’s lie that this Title IX rewrite does not impact women’s sports is a dishonest attempt to hide their woke agenda from to the American people.

In addition to its impact on sports, the Title IX Omnibus Rule also redefines “sexual harassment” to encompass a single instance of speech, which will, in effect:

1. force students and teachers to use “preferred pronouns” or face discipline;
2. require schools to eliminate all sexual misconduct, even such conduct of which they are unaware, pressuring schools to create woke bureaucracies to police speech; and
3. dissolve protections for accused students (again, whose action may be failure to use the “correct” pronouns), including the right to see evidence against them.

The administration’s draft rules, released on June 23, 2022, “in celebration” of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, generated overwhelming public opposition, with citizens filing a record number of comments with the Department of Education.

Independent Women’s Voice, IWF’s 501(c)(4) sister organization, drove more than 20,000 public comments to the Department of Education opposing the Biden administration’s plan to gut Title IX. The legal and policy objections filed by IWF and Independent Women’s Law Center can be read below:

Female athletes and IWF ambassadors react to the Biden administration’s Title IX Omnibus Rule:

Coach Kim Russell, former Head Women’s Lacrosse Coach at Oberlin College and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador, said: “Make no mistake, this rule will be used by schools as justification for unlawfully punishing anyone who dares to dissent from the orthodoxy of gender ideology. I experienced first hand the desire of woke bureaucrats to punish people who speak out on behalf of women. For now, the Biden administration has provided those bureaucrats cover. But I am confident that this rule will not stand and will be struck down as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.”

Paula Scanlan, former University of Pennsylvania swimmer and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador said: “If allowed to stand, the Biden administration’s new rule will set women back decades, eroding the impressive gains that Title IX ushered in.”

Riley Gaines, former 12-time All-American swimmer at the University of Kentucky and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador, said: “With its new Title IX rewrite, the Biden administration is unilaterally erasing fifty years of equal opportunity law for women. The president and his administration can’t act like they care about women or our opportunities and then go and wipe out women’s protections under the country’s landmark sex equality law.”

Independent Women’s Forum has been leading the fight to Take Back Title IX and save women’s sports. Learn more below:

Independent Women’s Forum ambassadors recently joined the “Take Back Title IX” roundtable, hosted by U.S. Senators on Capitol Hill, to advocate fairness in women’s sports. Read their written testimonies here.

IWF and IWLC have produced a first-of-its-kind report entitled, “Competition Report: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat To Women’s Sports,” to help athletic associations, policymakers, and courts understand the growing threat to female athletes.

IWF’s Female Athlete Storytelling drive featuring real stories from real women athletes can be found here.

IWF organized the first Our Bodies, Our Sports Rally in Washington DC on June 23, 2022 to take back Title IX. The rally, held across the street from the White House, featured female athletes, coaches, parents, and advocates and 17 organizations across the political spectrum to celebrate 50 years of Title IX and urge policymakers to help keep women’s sports female.

*****

This article was produced by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Largest Christian University in the U.S. Was Fined $37 Million. Coincidence or Targeted Attack? thumbnail

The Largest Christian University in the U.S. Was Fined $37 Million. Coincidence or Targeted Attack?

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By Family Research Council

A dust storm of political madness is brewing in Phoenix, Arizona as Grand Canyon University faces the continued threats of Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Christians have watched as the Biden administration attacks biblical views left and right, with a particularly vehement disregard of the sanctity of life and marriage. As such, it can’t be too surprising that Cardona, a part of this leftist administration, has “vowed” to shut down America’s largest Christian university.

In late October, GCU was hit with “a $37.7 million fine brought by the federal government over allegations that it lied to students about the cost of its programs,” AP News reported — an accusation GCU President Brian Mueller described as “ridiculous.” Around the same time, Liberty University, America’s second largest Christian university, was also fined $37 million “over alleged underreporting of crimes.” GCU appealed its fine in November even though a hearing is not expected until January 2025. But the question Mueller has is one of integrity. Is this genuine consideration for the well-being of students, or is this a targeted attack against religious institutions?

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the two largest Christian universities in the country, this one and Liberty University, are both being fined almost the identical amount at almost the identical time?” the college president speculated in a speech. “Now is there a cause and effect there? I don’t know. But it’s a fact.”

This April, the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing specifically about the administration’s decision to “crack down on GCU and other universities like it.” During the proceedings, Cardona and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), made their disapproval for GCU and similar universities obvious. “[W]e are cracking down not only to shut them down, but to send a message to not prey on students,” Cardona emphasized.

Supporters of GCU agree the fine seems unprecedented and motivated by ideological bias, including American Principles Project Policy Director Jon Schweppe, who said, “The federal government’s education agenda is punishing schools that do not conform to their progressive ideology. It’s time we take a stand against this egregious abuse of power.” Another conservative think tank, the Goldwater Institute (GI), sued the Department of Education for “refusing to turn over” public “documents that explain why” they’re fining GCU. The goal of their lawsuit is to unmask the reason behind the fine.

“With its motto of ‘private, Christian, affordable’ and its track record of graduating students into high-demand and high-paying jobs, GCU is a success story by any metric. And it stands apart from universities across the country that are facing declining enrollment, that are indoctrinating students with radical politics, and that are under attack for failing to defend the First Amendment,” GI wrote. “So then why are the feds targeting GCU, a popular university that seems to be doing everything right? That’s exactly what we’re going to find out.”

While there is still immense uncertainty surrounding this case, GCU president took the time to share with The Washington Stand how his staff, faculty, and students are fairing in these troubling times and how believers everywhere can help. Mueller emphasized that GCU has faced various issues over the years. But despite the government’s action, he wanted people to know that “interestingly enough, “it has had zero impact on anything that we’re doing.”

He continued, “The enrollments are just continuing to grow … [and] the morale is very high in terms of our faculty and staff. The campus is extremely vibrant. I mean, the students absolutely love this place. They’re extremely loyal to it, and so we just keep marching through it.” And while the fine they’re being dealt by the Department of Education is “a problem,” Mueller is just thankful that GCU remains optimistic.

The Christian “mission, not politics, is our motivation and it is our hope,” he told TWS. As a university, Mueller explained how they exist to “pour into” the community around them. He added, “[O]ur reach into the neighborhood and caring for disadvantaged populations has been a way to live out our faith” in a way “that has risen above … political divide.” Ultimately, with support from “both sides of the aisle” in Arizona, he noted, “[A]ll the issues we have are with a very small number of people in Washington D.C.”

“We encourage people to be involved politically and vote,” Mueller said. “… But our faith will stand above the politics always, and our politics will never become our religion.” Because, for “many people in our country today, their politics have become their religion, and that’s when things … go really bad in our society.” He pointed out that GCU is “trying to be an example of a Christian community that can rise above those things and focus on helping people” through service, as Scripture calls believers to do.

Mueller concluded with a request for prayer as they work through these troubling times and for “the hearts of certain people in Washington, D.C. to be softened,” adding that “it’s hard to make progress and resolve differences when people just … don’t want to talk to each other.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘That Is Not a Religion’: DeSantis Bars Satanists from Florida School Chaplaincy Program thumbnail

‘That Is Not a Religion’: DeSantis Bars Satanists from Florida School Chaplaincy Program

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By Family Research Council

The Sunshine State is now welcoming chaplains into public schools, but Satanists need not apply. On Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law allowing chaplains to volunteer to offer counseling at public and charter schools. However, the Catholic governor warned that Satanists would not be accepted into the program, as some Christian and conservative groups had feared.

“Now some have said if you do a school chaplain program that somehow you’re going to have Satanists running around in all our schools,” DeSantis said in a press conference. “We’re not playing those games in Florida. That is not a religion. That is not qualifying to be able to participate in this. We’re going to be using common sense when it comes to this, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

The Florida Senate version of the Bill was approved in February and the House version approved early last month. The legislation’s text states, “Each school district or charter school may adopt a policy to authorize volunteer school chaplains to provide supports, services, and programs to students as assigned by the district school board or charter school governing board.” The new law requires volunteer chaplains to pass a background check and would require school administrators to publicize each volunteer chaplain’s religious affiliation and obtain parental consent before a student begins counseling.

“Any opportunity that exists for ministers or chaplains in the public sector must not discriminate based on religious affiliation,” said The Satanic Temple’s (TST) “Director of Ministry” Penemue Grigori in February. “Our ministers look forward to participating in opportunities to do good in the community, including the opportunities created by this bill, right alongside the clergy of other religions.” Ryan Jayne of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Action Fund added, “I think there is a 100% chance you see satanic chaplains, and also of course other religious minorities that the majority-Christian population might not be a fan of. The Satanic Temple is a church, whether people like it or not.”

“It is wonderful to have such a strong statement denying the legitimacy of Satanism as a religion or church from Governor DeSantis. But I worry that appeals to common sense will not hold in the most ideological school systems, even in Florida,” Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Education Studies Meg Kilgannon commented to The Washington Stand. “Regardless, this is an important step in acknowledging the role that faith plays in our lives and how important it is that the big questions students have about morality, life and death, and God’s plan for their lives are best answered by a parent or priest, pastor, or chaplain.”

DeSantis has criticized Satanism in the past, arguing that it is not a religion. In December, after military veteran and outspoken Christian Michael Cassidy toppled and beheaded a Baphomet idol erected in the Iowa state capitol building by TST, the Florida governor declared, “Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government. … Good prevails over evil — that’s the American spirit.”

On its website, TST responds to the question “Do you worship Satan?” The organization states, “No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural.” TST adds, “Satan is a symbol of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority, forever defending personal sovereignty even in the face of insurmountable odds. … Our metaphoric representation is the literary Satan best exemplified by Milton and the Romantic Satanists from Blake to Shelley to Anatole France.”

Now that it has been signed by DeSantis, Florida’s new law goes into effect on July 1.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Largest Christian University in the U.S. Was Fined $37 Million. Coincidence or Targeted Attack?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

A Female Jewish Yale Student Stabbed in Eye By Male Terrorist Student thumbnail

A Female Jewish Yale Student Stabbed in Eye By Male Terrorist Student

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By The Geller Report

Hitler youth have taken over college campuses. Horrific.

Where did America think all this jihad porn and islamophilia would lead would lead?

Geller Reader commenter, ‘Will National and Conn. Jewish Federation, ADL, AJC demand appropriate punishment – or just have another meeting to tell parents and students how to “handle” antisemitism? Think how powerfully the establishment Jewish organizations would act if the victim was part of any other minority group other than a Jew.’ 

Jewish Yale student stabbed in eye with PLO flag

BY: JNS, April 21, 2024:

A Jewish student at Yale University was stabbed in the eye with a PLO flag during an anti-Israel demonstration at the school’s New Haven, Conn., campus on Saturday night.

“Tonight at Yale, I was assaulted by a student today at an anti-Israel protest. He stabbed me in the eye with a Palestinian flag. Now I’m in the hospital. This is what happens when visibly Jewish students try to attend and document these rallies,” Sahar Tartak, a sophomore, tweeted after the incident.

Tonight at Yale, I was assaulted by a student today at an anti-Israel protest. He stabbed me in the eye with a Palestinian flag. Now I’m in the hospital. This is what happens when visibly Jewish students try to attend and document these rallies.

— Sahar Tartak🇮🇱🇺🇸 (@sahar_tartak) April 21, 2024

Tartak, who is studying history and is the editor-in-chief of the independent Yale Free Press college newspaper, was attempting to film the pro-Palestinian encampment set when she and a friend were confronted by five activists who formed a wall and would not let them pass.

“One of them takes their Palestinian flag and waves it in my face and then jabs it in the face,” Tartak told The Jerusalem Post.

Tartak reported the incident to the campus police who called her an ambulance. She went to the hospital and was discharged without suffering permanent damage.

She said that protesters pushed her and her friend repeatedly. Earlier documentation Tartak posted to X showed the demonstrators commemorating the recently deceased Walid Daqqa, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist who was convicted of murdering an Israeli soldier in 1984.

Here is the terrorist that Yale student group Yalies4Palestine put on display on campus Walid Daqqa. Convicted of commanding a group which kidnapped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered an Israeli soldier in 1984. Students put flowers at his shrine at Yale pic.twitter.com/X6LDVmcN5b

— Sahar Tartak🇮🇱🇺🇸 (@sahar_tartak) April 21, 2024

Tartak also posted video she took of protesters at Yale yelling, “Viva via Palestina” as they pull down an American flag, cheering when it hits the ground. She noted that the university police and administration did nothing in response.

A mob of Yale students shout “VIVA VIVA PALESTINA” as they tear down an American flag on campus, cheering when it hits the floor.t but they said they needed “authorization.” She also noted that they were outnumbered by the pro-Palestinian mob of thousands of activists to only seven police officers.

No arrests were made during the protests, according to two groups involved—Yalies for Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine Connecticut. They said the protest started on Friday night in response to attempts to break up a similar encampment on the Columbia University campus.

“These students are violating every policy in the books, they should have been disbanded immediately,” Tartak told the Post. “These students have taken over campus, and it’s an intimidation tactic.”

In her tweet and Post interview, Tartak did not identify the assailant who stabbed her with the flag or say if she will press charges.

A mob of Yale students shout “VIVA VIVA PALESTINA” as they tear down an American flag on campus, cheering when it hits the floor.

(Oh, and university cops do nothing in response. Nor does the administration) pic.twitter.com/4aghYw1NBo

— Sahar Tartak🇮🇱🇺🇸 (@sahar_tartak) April 21, 2024

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Pro-Hamas hunger strikers at Yale have drag queen speak, he doesn’t condemn Hamas

HITLER YOUTH Rampage at Columbia University; Pro-Terror Jew Haters Call for Killing of Jewish Students, Praise Jihad Murderers

POSTS ON X:

Yale University – a female Jewish student was stabbed in the eye by the pictured man at last night’s pro terror rally on campus.

Recognize him? DM us and help secure his arrest!

Enough is enough. pic.twitter.com/GOa8l0fwkb

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) April 21, 2024

Yale: Jewish student told by protest organizers blockading me at a violent anti-Jewish rally that he can only join the rally on the “outskirts” and “outside.” Jews can’t get too close—when I tried to walk forward, they blockaded. Then I got stabbed in the eye by a 🇵🇸 flag pic.twitter.com/lhKnOirJJv

— Sahar Tartak🇮🇱🇺🇸 (@sahar_tartak) April 21, 2024

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Pro-Hamas hunger strikers at Yale have drag queen speak, he doesn’t condemn Hamas thumbnail

Pro-Hamas hunger strikers at Yale have drag queen speak, he doesn’t condemn Hamas

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By Jihad Watch

These people’s balloon never lands. Let Tifa Wine/Ryan Persadie visit Tel Aviv and see what happens to him there, and then make his way to Gaza City.

Facts, however, seldom trouble the left.

Drag performer speaks to anti-Israel Yale hunger strikers — without condemning homophobic Hamas

by Olivia Land, New York Post, April 20, 2024:

A drag performer spoke to anti-Israel hunger strikers at Yale University about higher education being a “capitalist necropolitical machine” — but failed to mention that Hamas is anti-LGBTQIA+ rights.

“No matter how many equity seminars you hold, how many DEI committees you form, how many land acknowledgments you produce …we know that educational institutions are crafted as corporate legacies of entrapment, confinement and ideological regulation,” drag performer Tifa Wine told the hunger strikers Friday clad in a [sic], according to a video from independent reporter Stu.

The Yale Hunger Strike had Tifa Wine/Ryan Persadie deliver a “Drag Sermon” to keep them motivated as they held their hunger strike.

“I stand in deep solidarity and grief with everyone here as we feel in our bodies the layered ongoing Colonial violences of the transatlantic… pic.twitter.com/QsCN4y5i1M

— Stu (@thestustustudio) April 19, 2024

The performer — wearing a red cape and jumpsuit with a keffiyeh scarf — went on to lament the “genocides and dispossessions” that “made Yale University … possible as a capitalist necropolitical machine” as she addressed the crowd at the New Haven campus’ Beinecke Plaza.

When not performing in drag, Tifa Wine — also known as Ryan Persadie — is a visiting instructor of gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies at Connecticut College, according to his online profile.

On Friday, the Yale hunger strikers were on their sixth day of forgoing food as part of their demonstration to push the university to divest from weapons manufacturers affiliated with Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip….

Read more.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED ARTICLES:

Biden regime set to sanction IDF unit while sending billions to Hamas-funding Iran

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Uganda: Muslim puts pesticide in his mother’s food, killing her, because she left Islam and became a Christian

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Uganda: Muslims beat Christian on Good Friday after saying he was not allowed to preach during Ramadan

Love Jihad hits India: Hindu girl raped throughout Ramadan, another is publicly stabbed to death

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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The Colorblind Counterattack

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By GianCarlo​​​​ Canaparo

We prefer the term “righteous indignation” to “hatred” because we know that it is very hard to pour hatred on sin without splashing any on the sinner. Yet hatred is the right response to evil. Righteous indignation can deliver only a pulled punch; hatred, a death blow.

That blow must be carefully aimed, but if it is, we will find in delivering it a kind of joy: the joy of “finding at last what hatred was made for.” Few good men, CS Lewis tells us, ever encounter this joy. They pull their punches, fearing that their hatred is aimed, at least in part, not at evil, but at another soul.

Two men writing two books, however, have found that rare and furious joy. In their very different assaults upon the same evil idea, Andre Archie (The Virtue of Color-Blindness) and Coleman Hughes (The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America) have found “congruity between [their] emotion and its object,” and they rain blows on it.

Their object is the racialism that has poisoned America. It goes by different names: critical race theory, antiracism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whatever it’s called, it holds that color, not character, is the locus of moral merit; that differences in material outcomes among color groups are the prime evil; that these differences come from oppression; and that to cure this oppression, society must discriminate against oppressors. In short, it holds that individuals of certain colors ought to be sacrificed to benefit groups of another color.

Hughes calls this ideology “neoracism,” and Archie, “corrosive barbarism.”

Each frames his book as a defense of color-blindness — the principle, in Hughes’s words, that “we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.” Yet both authors are frustrated that their books are even necessary. How on earth, Archie seems to wonder, could the “noble racial tradition of color-blindness” retreat in the face of race hucksters peddling “intellectual nonsense” to “useful idiots” who go along with it to get along? How on earth, Hughes seems to wonder, could the ideas of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., find themselves labeled “white supremacist”?

Hughes and Archie have shaken off the shellshock, and now stand ready to fight back. Their books are therefore better characterized as counterattacks than as defenses.

The authors pour fire and scorn on the “sophistry,” “absurdity,” “bigotry,” “defeatism,” and “nihilism,” of the “depressing and debilitating belief” that every American is defined by his race label. Both books explore the origins of this evil idea, paying special attention to the prominent race hucksters who popularized it. After that, however, the authors’ avenues of attack diverge.

Hughes attacks on logical and empirical grounds. He argues that the defining features of the racialist worldview are arbitrariness and fact-blindness. The hucksters are wrong, he reasons , because they cannot produce the quantitative outcomes that they say they want. Worse, they will harm the very people they claim to want to help, to say nothing of everyone else.

Consider the racial categories with which we’re all so familiar. They may work in casual conversation, but try to use them as the basis of policy, and you will immediately realize that they are spectacularly arbitrary. To give slavery reparations to black people, for example, you run into a host of unfixable problems. One-in-five black Americans are recent immigrants, only four-in-ten black Americans say their ancestors were enslaved in the United States, and many, like former president Barack Obama, are descendants of both slaves and slaveholders. Most vexing yet is the problem of deciding who is black. One-half? One-eighth? One drop?

And then there are the neoracists’ empirical claims about the causes and cures of racial disparities. Here, Hughes channels Thomas Sowell and launches a fusillade of data at his opponents’ myths and absurdities. If we discriminate on the basis of race, as the neoracists do, the results will be arbitrary, and arbitrary policies can’t help anyone. Instead, Hughes argues, they will “create an enormous amount of justified resentment,” and breed the “racial tribalism” that has “marred and disfigured human societies throughout history.”

The core of the problem, says Hughes, is that the race hucksters are trapped in cognitive dissonance. They say race is a social construct but enforce “the rules of race” with a zeal matched only by “old-school racists.” They decry stereotypes but use stereotypes. They demand justice but mete out injustice to punish “racial-historical bloodguilt.”

Hughes’s argument is thorough, his logic relentless, and his use of data rigorous. These strengths, however, are also weaknesses. His opponents’ arguments are neither logical nor empirical. They speak in the language of morality warped by emotion, and Hughes has responded to them in a different language.

Still, there are many people who are not in thrall to the misbegotten morality of the neoracists. They speak Hughes’s language, and his message is powerful.

This brings us to Andre Archie.

Unlike Hughes, Archie attacks the racialist worldview on ethical grounds. It is no coincidence that a professor of Greek philosophy called his book the Virtue of Color-blindness. The hucksters are wrong, he argues, because they promote ascriptive qualities over character. They assign moral worth to the body, not to the soul. In so doing, they tear at the creed and culture that sustain America and, if left to it, will “destroy completely the ordered liberty that has defined our way of life for nearly three hundred years.”

Archie’s book is aimed at conservatives. In his telling, the race hucksters successfully beat back and bottled up the color-blind principle mainly because conservatives failed to fight. Conservatives didn’t want to fight when the race hucksters falsely claimed the moral high ground. Conservatives didn’t want to be called racist.

Left unsaid by Archie, but true, is that many conservatives failed to defend color-blindness not only out of fear of being called racist, but also because they forgot how to make any arguments but utilitarian ones. And those are hard arguments to make; who has the time to read everything by Thomas Sowell?

But Archie’s point — and this is his profound contribution to a genre over-saturated with data analysis — is that data don’t matter. Even if the hucksters were right that “antiracist discrimination” would usher in a utopia of material equality, Archie would still oppose them because material ends cannot justify immoral means. There are souls within these arbitrary racial groups, and when souls are at stake, “quantitative judgments don’t apply.”

At this point, we find a potential weakness in Archie’s book: its highest authority is the ancient Greeks. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were three of the greatest minds in history. Their philosophical tradition served as a cornerstone of America. But what those great Greek minds said about human nature, character, and choice — about the soul — is not worth believing simply because those great minds said it, but because it was first written on their hearts by a higher authority that Archie only hints at, leaving his reader wondering whether the Greeks’ greatness alone is enough to rally wavering conservatives.

In Archie’s defense, however, because the truths that the Greeks found are written on our hearts, people will respond to them no matter what they believe about their source. Truth moves us. We can’t help it.

At any rate, it is very good luck, if luck it is, that these books came out at the same time. Like hammer and anvil, both are needed to smash what lies between them. Hughes’s book is needed because Americans have forgotten how to make moral arguments. We are utilitarians now, so empirical books remain essential. If, however, empirical books were enough to defeat racialism, then Semple, Sowell, Steele, Loury and countless other data wizards would have dispelled it ages ago. Unfortunately, empirical analysis is not enough: “The race problem is a moral one,” wrote Alexander Crummel in 1889, “its solution will come especially from the domain of principles.” Thus, a rebirth of moral reasoning is needed. Thank heaven for Archie.

Maybe, if we storm racialism from both sides, then color-blindness can retake the offensive and beat back and bottle up its foe. We might not kill racialism outright on this side of eternity, but we might just manage to make color-blindness our “North Star,” as Hughes said in a recent interview. If we do, we will have done ourselves and our country a lot of good.

But only, as Archie reminds us, if we are willing to stand up and fight. So up, and over your barricades. There is joy to be found in this fight.

*****

This article was published by AIER, the American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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A Pulitzer Awaits the Arizona Daily Star

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By Craig J. Cantoni

A recent Wall Street Journal column on the scam of the federal student-loan program brought to mind the financial, governance, and ethical mess at the University of Arizona (UA).

The Arizona Daily Star’s coverage of the UA mess has been commendable, thanks to reporter Ellie Wolfe.  A Pulitzer Prize awaits her if she ties UA’s travails to the moral hazards created by the federal student-loan program, a program that has been implicitly endorsed, if not explicitly endorsed, by UA’s faculty and administrative staff.

The Wall Street Journal column in question was written by the superb columnist Allysia Finley.  (“The Big Bank Elizabeth Warren Loves,” April 14, 2024). Finley drew two conclusions about the federal student-loan program that seem hyperbolic but aren’t:

Never has there been a bigger taxpayer scam than the federal student-loan program.

The student-loan office is the biggest government monopoly and predatory lender in U.S. history.

How is this related to the UA?  Because it stands to reason that student loans have distorted UA’s finances, economics, academic standards, admission numbers, and graduation rates. It stands to reason because empirical studies have documented the distortive effects on higher education in general of billions in federal loans sloshing about.

Certainly, the billions have not resulted in the UA and other universities being more efficient, productive and cost-conscious.

Nor has the money transformed the bastions of social justice into paragons of justice.  To the opposite, colleges have become grifters by taking money from students who would be better off in trade school instead of college, who have little chance of graduating, who are in degree programs with little financial payoff, who can’t pay off their student loans, and who, thanks to the munificence of President Biden, can now expect taxpayers instead of the college grifters to eat the loans.

This is justice?  This is ethical?

Research leading to a Pulitzer could delve into such important questions as the following:

The Global Campus

Would UA have made the questionable acquisition of the on-line “university” known as Global Campus if it were not for student loans?  Related questions:  How many Global Campus students have outstanding loans and in what amount, how many of these students can expect to graduate, what is their loan balance upon graduation or dropping out, and what are their expected earnings, by degree, if they do graduate?

The Brick-and-Mortar Campus

Similar questions as above could be asked and answered about loan balances, graduation rates, and expected earnings of students on the main campus.

University Costs Before and After the Tuition-Loan Bonanza

What were the key metrics and financials at the UA before and after the federal student-loan program became entrenched and caused a skyrocketing of student debt?  What was the amount of administrative overhead before and after, the amount of capital spending on country-club amenities for students before and after, the amount of money spent on athletics before and after, graduation rates before and after, tuition fees before and after, and the cost of room and board before and after?

Political and Ideological Effects

How has the loan money and other government monies affected the political and ideological leanings of students, faculty, and administrators?  Have they become more or less in favor of redistribution, collectivism, and bigger government?

In addition to the above, parallels could be drawn between the rising cost of college and the rising cost of mortgages and housing.  The tuition-loan program played a role in the former, and government housing programs and policies played a role in the latter—along with the Federal Reserve’s years of quantitative easing and zero interest rates, which drove up asset prices to the benefit of owners of assets.  Now, to counter the inevitable economic distortions resulting from the government’s economic distortions, the Fed has raised interest rates, thus making mortgages more expensive and reducing the supply of houses.

Distortions beget distortions beget distortions.

If Arizona Daily Star reporter Ellie Wolfe were to use her talents in exposing the truth about student loans, she might win a Pulitzer.  Even if she didn’t, her work could become a template for other newspapers and could put Tucson in the limelight as a center of excellent journalism free of political bias.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Sex Education of Our Nation’s Children: Since the Sexual Revolution thumbnail

The Sex Education of Our Nation’s Children: Since the Sexual Revolution

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By Kali Fontanilla

Since the Sexual Revolution

Then came the 1960s and the Sexual Revolution. Many attribute the Sexual Revolution to the birth control pill approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Some states banned the pill entirely or made it illegal for single women to purchase, but by 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried women was unconstitutional. At the same time, attitudes about sex changed. Sex was no longer culturally tied to marriage and children.

With this change, a new organization was formed to tackle sexual health and education in America.Mary S. Calderone, the medical director of Planned Parenthood of America, co-founded the Sex Information and Education Council (SEICUS) in 1964. SEICUS had a mission of moving America away from the Family Life focus of sex education of the past. They asserted that “sex is not just something you do in marriage, in a bed, in the dark, in one position. Sex is what it means to be a man or woman.” This was the first time the nation had been introduced to comprehensive sex education programs in our public high schools. The type of sex education promoted by SEICUS included content on gays, lesbians, and masturbation.

Another proponent of comprehensive sex education during the time was Lester A Kendell, who wanted the nation’s sex education programs to move away from the idea that premarital sex was harmful to society or individuals. He explained, “The purpose of sex education is not primarily to control and suppress sex expression, as in the past, but to indicate the immense possibilities for human fulfillment that human sexuality offers.” You can see how this mindset would lead to a focus on pleasure-based sex education, perhaps something fine for classes given to adults but wholly inappropriate for instruction to children.

SEICUS produced study guides on sex education, masturbation, and homosexuality with funding from the Office of Education at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. With the wide distribution of its guides, SIECUS received requests from schools to help with their sex education programs. The Family Life Education programs, as proclaimed by the sexual progressives, were deemed insufficient to meet the educational needs of the rapidly changing sex lives of the American people. Or were the times really changing as quickly as we have been told?

If you look at the statistics from the time of the Sexual Revolution, the mindset of Americans was still pretty tame. It turns out not everyone was a free-love hippie. Of married women, 21 percent had no premarital sex, and 43 percent of women had only one premarital sex partner—their future husband. Even as late as the 1980s, over half of women had only one partner before walking down the aisle. Compare this to 2010, where only 5 percent of new brides are virgins. It’s all relative. At the time, the Sexual Revolution seemed wild, but in comparison, today, it was PG. Regardless, sex education organizations like SEICUS found their angle to get into the schools and promote their loose view of sex to those under 18.

Source: Nicholas H. Wolfinger, “Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability,” Institute for Family Studies, June 6, 2016, https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability.

By the 1980s, around half the states in America adopted comprehensive sex education curricula, while the rest continued to teach Family Life Education classes emphasizing abstinence before marriage. But in the mid-1980s, the deadly AIDS epidemic fundamentally changed how America viewed sex. With an almost 100 percent fatal rate at the time, both sides of the sex education debates blamed each other. Those in favor of more abstinence-centered programs believed that the AIDS epidemic was caused by the overall moral decline of society and the sanctioning of permissive attitudes toward sex by those favoring comprehensive sex education programs. Organizations like SEICUS used the AIDS epidemic to justify the need for more information on homosexual relationships to be taught in our schools. In 1986, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop pushed for comprehensive sex education in our nation’s public schools. “There is no doubt that we need sex education in our schools, and it includes information on heterosexual and homosexual relationships,” Koop wrote in his report. “The need is critical, and the price of neglect is high.”

But was the need critical? Yes, the AIDS epidemic was scary and certainly made the headlines, but the realistic chance for an American to contract and then die from AIDS in the 1980s was around 0.0002 percent. Nevertheless, AIDS deaths were the tragic excuse needed to get more instruction in our sex education programs about homosexual sex and a general push toward comprehensive sex ed.

Fast forwarding to today, some organizations are pushing for more pleasure-based sex education, completely obliterating the lines of what most sane people would consider appropriate to talk about with children. Consider that the National Education Association’s LGBTQ caucus recommends the Queering Sex Education Teen Guide. The guide asserts:

We recognize the need for an alternative sex education resource. It’s not okay that gaps are being left and our sexual experiences are being ignored: there’s so much opportunity in the queer world, and that includes queer sex. Penis and vagina is one kind of sex, but it’s not the only kind of sex! This information should not only be available but celebrated. We want to re-frame the sex that we have and the sex that we want to have as something positive. We want to see the kind of sex we have and want to have reflected in the curriculum. It’s needed.

The guide recommends that students be taught about fisting, rimming, bondage, and sadomasochism. They also have a resource video produced by Planned Parenthood of Toronto to teach students about all those acts. This is just one example of the push for pleasure-based sex education in our schools. The point is that putting a condom on a banana was PG-13, but now they want sex education to be NC-17. America, this is not a joke. This is really happening.

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Saving K-12 Private Schools — What seems daunting is actually rather simple! thumbnail

Saving K-12 Private Schools — What seems daunting is actually rather simple!

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By John Droz, Jr.

I’m a proud product of Catholic education. I had Sisters of St Joseph for grammar school, Xavarian Brothers for high school, and Jesuits for college (Boston College). I went off the reservation for graduate school (Syracuse), but the die had been set.

I attribute my skills and interest in Critical Thinking to the fine teachers I had.

Attentive readers of my commentaries are well aware that I have been extensively involved with the K-12 education business, for both public and private schools. IMO both need to be preserved, which means that both need fixing.

The main (of several) threat to the public school system is that anti-American Left-wing ideology is taking over the curriculum in almost every subject area, but especially in Science and History.

The fix for this starts with Conservative organizations (e.g., Heritage & AEI) paying a LOT more attention to the curricula. Although they typically say that education is a top priority, curricula have been largely ignored. Not surprisingly, the Left is aggressively taking full advantage of this shameful neglect.

Additionally, State Education Superintendents (and State Boards of Education) also need to give the curricula a lot more attention. This business of giving deference to education administrators who oversee curricula, is toxic nonsense — as many of those people are a major part of the problem. This deference has led to multiple bad outcomes, like the purposefully deceptive Social Emotional Learning (SEL) scam.

This is just a bit of background, as this commentary is about Catholic Schools.

K-12 Catholic schools used to be successful as many parents strongly wanted to have their children taught Judeo-Christian standards, and were willing to pay for this. However, times have changed (in many ways) — but most Catholic schools are still relying on this archaic model.

Another outdated part of the Old Model is that the default solution to every financial challenge is to have another fund-raiser (rather than do things differently to prevent the financial problem).

Just one example of how times have changed is that the number of Catholics attending weekly Mass has dropped precipitously over the last few decades. It stands to reason that when parents are less attached to Judeo-Christian standards, their interest in having their kids be taught Judeo-Christian standards will also decrease.

Considering that the cost of K-12 Catholic schools can be substantial, the question is: will these parents be willing to pay a premium cost for what is (in effect) a public school plus a religion class? The answer for many parents is NO.

The good news here is that COVID has provided the solution!

For the first time, parents had the opportunity to look over the shoulders of their children to see what they were being taught. Two problems quickly became apparent:

  1. their children are being told WHAT to think rather than HOW to think, and
  2. the WHAT part is largely Left-Wing, atheistic, and anti-American.

The result of this is that there has been an unprecedented increase in Home-Schooling.

However, very few parents want to home-school their children, as (to do it right) this requires an enormous amount of time, effort, and competence on their part. Further, their child would largely miss out on the positive social benefits of interacting with other classmates, as well as lose out on extra-curricular activities. (E.g., I was the editor of my high school’s weekly Newspaper which was a fabulous experience.)

The light bulb should go on at Catholic (and other private) schools: that this new set of needs should be the basis for a New Model. They should be loudly telling parents:

  1. their children will be taught HOW to think (i.e., Critical Thinking skills), and
  2. their children will be given a Judeo-Christian, pro-American, classic education.

As a refresher, here are some of the MANY benefits of being a Critical Thinker… If you can’t intuitively see the merits of this New Model, then look at how a real-world example has been a resounding success — at a relatively low cost besides!

The Bottom Line here is that (since times have changed rather radically) Catholic Schools need to be aware that they must adopt the New Model. The slow learners will suffer the fate of those who laboriously put all their memories on VHS tapes.

©2024. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Chicago: Leftist Muslim teaches American leftists to scream ‘Death to America’ in Farsi

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2023 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

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