America’s Systemic Racism Problem Is Mostly In Woke, Anti-Asian Education Bureaucracies thumbnail

America’s Systemic Racism Problem Is Mostly In Woke, Anti-Asian Education Bureaucracies

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By Helen Raleigh

Public school officials caused harm to Asian students’ college applications by not notifying them of important academic achievements.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin began 2023 by asking the state’s Attorney General Jason Miyares to investigate the allegation that officials at Thomas Jefferson High School (TJ) intentionally withheld notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s students and families (most of them are Asians) in the name of “equity” and “inclusion.”

Asra Q. Nomani, a human rights activist and a proud mom of a TJ graduate, broke the latest scandal at the school right before Christmas. According to Nomani, the scandal was initially uncovered by another TJ mom, Shawna Yashar, whose son took the PSAT test. He was recognized by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation “as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide — one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction.” It was the kind of honor that would have helped his applications for colleges and scholarships last fall had the TJ officials not withheld his award announcement. When the TJ officials eventually notified him of his award, the deadline for his college applications had already passed, which rendered the award useless.

Nomani learned that her son, a graduate of TJ’s class of 2021, was never told by school officials that he was a “Commended Student” in 2020. Even more infuriating is that these two young men’s experiences were not the result of some honest one-time mistake.

Nomani discovered that “the principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and the director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have been withholding this information from families and the public for years, affecting the lives of at least 1,200 students over the principal’s tenure of five years.” These officials’ actions (or inactions) disproportionally hurt Asian students because the majority of the school’s student body is Asian. By intentionally withholding awards and eventually delivering them late and in a low-key way, these officials robbed the students and their families of chances to celebrate hard-earned achievements.

In addition, these officials caused undue harm to these students’ college applications and scholarships. For some first-generation immigrants with no other financial resources to fall back on, the damage caused by these school officials’ actions could have a lifetime effect, with some students having to settle for less prestigious colleges or be forced to take out more student loans.

After Nomani broke the story, TJ’s director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, justified her action by insisting, “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements.” Does she understand that celebrating someone’s achievement and acknowledging someone’s effort is an important part of recognizing students as individuals?

Meanwhile, Bonitatibus “still hasn’t publicly recognized the students or told parents from earlier years that their students won the awards. And she hasn’t yet delivered the missing certificates.”

TJ is a prime example of the woke left’s systemic racism against Asian Americans in our education system. Besides withholding awards, TJ’s woke officials and liberals of the Fairfax County School Board also canceled the school’s merit-based and race-blind admission exam to increase the student body’s “diversity,” which has become a code word for “purging qualified Asians.” The result speaks for itself: Asian students make up 54 percent of the class of 2025, a dramatic decrease from 73 percent of the class of 2021.

Another elite high school that followed TJ’s lead and canceled its merit-based admission in 2021 has experienced disastrous results. San Francisco’s Lowell High School, once the best high school in the city, dropped out of the top 100 ranking of high schools nationwide for the first time in the school’s history after woke officials canceled the school’s merit-based admission and replaced it with a lottery system. After Asian American residents in the city successfully recalled three leftist members of the school board, the new members reinstated merit-based admission at Lowell last year.

At TJ, a group of concerned parents organized a group called the “Coalition for Thomas Jefferson High School,” and they sued Fairfax County Public School District for the school’s “unconstitutional” and discriminatory new admission policy. A federal judge ruled in favor of the coalition last year, but an appeals court stayed the decision.

The coalition filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court last year, but the high court declined to block TJ’s new anti-Asian admission policy. The high court decided before it heard two cases challenging affirmative action-based admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. The oral arguments of the two cases have given much hope that the Supreme Court will uphold America’s principle of equality under the law by ruling in June this year that affirmative action-based admission policies are unconstitutional.

But Asian Americans cannot rest our hope in one court’s ruling alone. A lot more should be done at the state level. That is why Youngkin’s announcement of launching a civil rights investigation of TJ officials who withheld awards from students is welcome news. Youngkin said, “Parents and students deserve answers. … I believe this failure may have caused material harm to those students and their parents and that this failure may have violated the Virginia Human Rights Act.” Youngkin was spot on.

What these school officials did was a violation of students’ civil rights. Youngkin’s consistent focus on education and the clarity in his messaging explains why many Asian voters supported him during his gubernatorial race.

I sincerely hope Youngkin’s investigation will not only right the wrongs for affected Asian American students and their families at TJ but also become a rallying cry for all patriotic Americans. The most pervasive form of institutional racism widely practiced today in the United States is the anti-Asian hate in our education system. From eliminating gifted and talented programs in K-12, to canceling merit-based entrance exams to elite high schools, to dropping standard tests from college admissions, the objective is to reduce Asian American representation regardless of our qualification and effort because we are the “wrong” kind of minority.

The woke left’s war on merit in our education system hurts more than Asian Americans. The war on merit is a war on fundamental American values and America’s future. No society can advance or even maintain its current standard of living if its education system discourages the pursuit of excellence, celebrates mediocrity, and treats people differently based on the color of their skin. Therefore, the pushback of the woke left’s war on merit in education should not be just Asian Americans’ fight. We need all concerned Americans to join us.

Hopefully, 2023 will be the year we stop the war on merit.

*****
This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

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The Twitter Files: Lenin Would Be Proud

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By Brian Balfour

“The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution; 1917

This Lenin quote leapt to mind amid the recent revelations coming from the “Twitter files” and exposed over the past several weeks. Among other disclosures, the files revealed direct lines of communication between government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Defense, and the social media company.

Twitter was found to not only be a landing spot for many agents in the government intelligence community, but also doing the bidding of agencies to suppress information deemed to be antithetical to the agencies’ goals and preferred narratives. Indeed, journalist Matt Taibbi went so far as to describe Twitter as an “FBI subsidiary.”

And it wasn’t just Twitter that the government targeted. Late last month Elon Musk tweeted “*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” illustrating his point by saying, “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Such revelations undercut many defenders of tech giants, who insist “they’re private companies, they can do what they want.” Instead, we must ask: are these truly ‘private companies’ in any meaningful sense?

Indeed, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman are all nominally “private companies.” But they are private in name only because they are in reality appendages of the state, relying on defense contracts (not market transactions) for their success.

We should treat big tech companies with the same skepticism we apply to tools of the military industrial complex. Certainly so after the “Twitter file” revelations.

In his quote above, Lenin was, of course, bragging about the progress made toward complete nationalization of industry in the Soviet Union of the time.

But we can also consider his statement as descriptive. When your main mission is to do the bidding of the state, rather than serving consumers in the voluntary marketplace, you are not really a private company in the true sense of the term. Your company is not a market phenomenon.

It’s no longer possible to defend social media corporations on the basis of private property rights, because big tech are what Michael Rectenwald would describe as “governmentalities,” not private companies.

Michael Rectenwald, former professor of liberal studies at New York University and author of the book “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” provided context for how he believes tech goliaths like Google and Twitter come to do the state’s bidding in a November 2020 lecture.

“In a series of lectures entitled Security, Territory, Population, the postmodern theorist Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘governmentality’ to refer to the distribution of state power to the population, or the transmission of governance to the governed,” Rectenwald noted.

“Foucault referred to the means by which the populace comes to govern itself as it adopts and personalizes the imperatives of the state, or how the governed adopt the mentality desired by the government—govern-mentality,” he added.

Rectenwald, however, went even further than Foucault. “I adopt and amend the term to include the distribution of state power to extragovernmental agents—in particular to the extension and transfer of state power to supposedly private enterprises.”

What transpires, then, is a form of ‘governmentalization’ of nominally private enterprises, rather than the privatization of government functions that free market advocates prefer.

How intertwined with the government are the tech giants? The relationship predates the more recent phenomena revealed by Elon Musk’s divulgences.

“First, both Google and Facebook received start-up capital—both directly and indirectly—from US intelligence agencies,” Rectenwald informs us. In their early days, Google in particular was heavily reliant on CIA contracts and deals with other U.S. intelligence agencies.

As Lenin boasted, “The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” And work for the government, including shutting down dissident voices, is what big tech has indeed been doing for years.

As a result, they can no longer be defended with cries of “but they’re private companies,” and instead be called out for what they really are: tools of state oppression.

*****
This article was published by American Research for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

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Election Fraud Database Tops 1,400 Cases

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By Hans von Spakovsky

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database now includes 1,412 proven instances of election fraud, and our legal center is monitoring many other ongoing prosecutions.

The database, which provides a sampling of recent election fraud cases, demonstrates the vulnerabilities within the electoral process and the need for reforms to secure free and fair elections for the American people.

The database doesn’t list potential fraud discovered by election officials and others that is never investigated or prosecuted, and it obviously cannot list fraud that goes undetected when states with poor security don’t have the tools in place to even realize such fraud is occurring.

But states—especially now that many state legislative sessions are beginning—should make stopping fraud and ensuring the integrity of their elections a top priority.

Here are a few examples of cases that were recently added to the database.

We’ve written before on the ballot-trafficking scheme orchestrated by Leslie McCrae Dowless, a political operative who was working on behalf of North Carolina 9th Congressional District candidate Mark Harris, a Republican, in 2018 involving stuffing the ballot box with fraudulent absentee ballots for Harris.

State election officials determined that Harris had no knowledge of what Dowless was doing.

Dowless, who died last April, was known in Braden County for ballot trafficking. He would “assist” certain candidates who hired him as a consultant for their campaigns, and those candidates or causes that Dowless supported seemed to have a sure way to win elections.

Authorities finally caught up with Dowless after his absentee-ballot trafficking scheme caused so much election fraud that, for the first time in 40 years, a congressional race was overturned, and the North Carolina State Board of Elections had to order a new election.

Dowless instructed his hired fraudsters to mark blank absentee ballots for Harris, complete unfinished absentee ballots, forge signatures on absentee ballots for individuals who were unaware ballots were being cast in their name, and then mail the ballots to election officials.

Officials became suspicious when 61% of the vote-by-mail ballots were cast for the Republican candidate, despite the fact that only 16% of the ballot-by-mail voters were registered Republicans.

Ginger Shae Eason, Tonia Gordon, Rebecca Thompson, Kelly Hendrix, James Singleton, Jessica Dowless, and Caitlyn Croom all pleaded guilty to felony charges related to this absentee-ballot fraud scheme. They were all sentenced to probation, ordered to complete community service, and assessed fines and court fees for their involvement in the fraud scheme.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only example of absentee-ballot fraud by an activist among our latest cases added to the database.

Janet Reed, an Evansville, Indiana, Democratic Party activist, sent illegally pre-marked absentee-ballot applications to voters ahead of the 2020 primary election. To make matters worse, Reed pre-selected the Democrat Party where voters were supposed to choose to receive either a Republican or Democratic primary ballot. Reed included instructions with the applications stating the party affiliation “needs no input.”

Despite receiving several warnings from election officials and even from the Democratic Party to knock it off, Reed kept sending out the pre-marked applications that interfered with the ability of voters to decide which party primary they wanted to vote in.

Reed pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of absentee ballots, was sentenced to 18 months of probation, and was ordered to pay restitution of $2,740 and court costs of $925. She was also barred from working on any elections while on probation.

Our latest update also features several instances of convicted felons voting.

In Florida, Marc Crump and Dedrick De’ron Baldwin were felons who were recently convicted of illegally voting in the 2020 general election.

Crump, who voted in the August 2020 primary and November 2020 general election, pleaded guilty to one count of false swearing and one count of illegal voting. He was sentenced to 10 months in jail and assessed $668 in costs and fees.

Baldwin was charged with two felonies after he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary and 2020 general election. He pleaded no contest to both charges and was sentenced to 364 days in prison on each count. Baldwin was already serving a 12-year sentence for manslaughter and aggravated battery.

The fraudulent conduct of those two ineligible voters was discovered following an investigation by Florida Department of Law Enforcement of Alachua County election supervisor Kim Barton, a Democrat, who organized voter-registration drives that improperly registered felons to vote.

In Arizona, Victor Aguirre, a convicted felon, registered to vote and then voted in the 2020 general election. Aguirre pleaded guilty to a felony charge of attempted illegal voting and was sentenced to a minimum term of six months in prison, to be followed by a period of supervised release, and was assessed fees and fines.

In Texas, Francisco Tamez Jr., another convicted felon, voted in the 2017 city of Edinburg municipal election. Tamez pleaded guilty to the felony charge and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

In Minnesota, Linda Maria Stately, of Little Falls, a convicted felon, registered and voted in the 2020 general election. Stately pleaded guilty to a felony charge of ineligible voting and was sentenced to five years of probation and assessed fines and fees. Her charges will be reduced to a misdemeanor if she successfully completes the terms of her probation.

A new case from Florida demonstrates the importance of implementing safeguards in the voter-registration system to detect election fraud, particularly in states that use online voter registration.

Anthony Guevara was charged with two felonies after he changed the voter-registration address of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the state’s voter-registration database online.

After the fraudulent address change was registered in the system, it was flagged, and law enforcement officers were able to trace the IP address to Guevara’s home. He pleaded no contest to the charges and was sentenced to two years of probation, 100 hours of community service, fined $5,421.39, and assessed $515 in court and prosecution costs.

Another example from Florida demonstrates how system safeguards of the type recommended in The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard can prevent fraudulent votes from being counted in the first place. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Larry Wiggins, a registered Democrat from Sarasota, requested a mail-in ballot on behalf of his late wife during the 2020 general election. Election staff discovered the fraud during a routine check of the voter rolls, which revealed that his wife had died two years earlier.

Wiggins forged his deceased wife’s signature on the ballot-request form and admitted that he intended to mail it back once he received it, but he was stopped by law enforcement. He pleaded no contest to one count of vote-by-mail fraud, and was sentenced to 24 months’ probation, 100 hours of community service, and assessed $738 in court costs, fees, and fines.

If Florida hadn’t had such safeguards and preventative checks in place, that ballot very well could have been cast and counted in the election.

It should come as no surprise that Florida—tied with Louisiana for the No. 6 ranking on our Election Integrity Scorecard—has demonstrated a commitment to improving its laws, regulations, and procedures to ensure secure elections.

We also recently added a couple of instances of ineligible aliens voting to the database.

In Ohio, Irnatine Boayue, an ineligible alien, registered and voted in the 2016 general election. Boayue pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of attempted false voter registration and was sentenced to one day in the Franklin County Correction Center. The court waived fines and court costs on account of the defendant’s indigency.

In Minnesota, Abdihakim Essa, also an alien, forged his father’s signature as a witness when submitting absentee ballots in Hennepin County. Essa pleaded guilty to four felony charges and was sentenced to 180 days in an adult correctional facility, 90 days of which were stayed pending successful completion of two years of supervised probation. He was also assessed $78 in court costs.

Zameahia Ismail, another alien, registered and voted in person in two different precincts in a Hennepin County, Minnesota, election in 2017. She voted in St. Louis Park, where she actually lived, and a second time in Minneapolis after being encouraged by an acquaintance to vote for Abi Warsame, a Democratic candidate for Minneapolis City Council.

She was not required to provide any identification in Minneapolis because her acquaintance vouched for her identity. Ismail, who pleaded guilty to the charge of registering in more than one precinct, was sentenced to a year in prison, with all but 20 days stayed pending successful completion of two years of supervised probation. She was also assessed fines and fees totaling $78.

As the latest updates to our Election Fraud Database illustrate, threats to fair and free elections continue to exist. As the more than 1,400 cases in the database should make abundantly clear, states should get to work implementing election reforms designed to improve the integrity of the election process.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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How Individuals Enable Tyranny

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By Barry Brownstein

It is easy to think the roots of tyranny lie outside of ourselves, but perhaps we are looking too far away.

In Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a Czech refugee living in Paris joins a protest march against the 1968 Soviet invasion of her homeland. To her surprise, the refugee could not bring herself to shout with the other protesters and soon left the rally. Her French friends didn’t understand her reluctance. The refugee silently mused that her friends could never understand that “behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”

Beware of groups marching in lockstep, even for a seemingly good cause, Kundera warns.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill pointed us in a similar direction when he observed a tyranny as terrible as any imposed by “public authorities.” Mill called it the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”

Mill described “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” Mill counseled, “individual independence” protected from “encroachment” from the tyranny of the majority “is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

The tyranny of societal mandates, Mill warned, can be “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, … it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

On Liberty was published in 1859. Sadly, the tendency Mill described is all-too-common among individuals living in 2023 who believe “their feelings… are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary.”

Often such “feelings” are based on the prevailing orthodoxy disseminated by The New York Times, NPR, and other such media outlets.

Worse, feelings-driven individuals up the ante and demand others conform. Mill explained, “The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act.”

Others may share your feelings and preferences. Yet, Mill reasoned, even when shared, individual preferences are not elevated to a guide for living for others:

No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one.

Here is Mill’s bottom line: “[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Your feelings, your opinions, your sense of what is good for you, your sense of what will make you happier “is not a sufficient warrant” to interfere with the individual sovereignty of any one else.

Mill was unequivocal about the wrongness of silencing dissenting voices: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

There has never been a dystopian novel, nor a totalitarian society, where freedom of speech was not suppressed.

The haunting question is why do so many enable totalitarians by demanding others conform to their personal feelings?

Mill taught us how to resign as an enabler of tyranny. Our feelings about an issue, no matter how widely shared, are never justification for coercing others or censoring competing views. Mill wrote, “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.” He argued that suppressors of other views “have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.”

Those who believe they should impose their opinions on others are probably not reading this essay. Among them are people who act as though they are infallible.

Hearing Mill’s arguments, some readers may see they silence themselves, believing their opinions are socially unacceptable. When we remain silent we co-create “collective illusions” which Todd Rose wrote are “social lies” occurring “in situations where a majority of individuals in a group privately reject a particular opinion, but they go along with it because they (incorrectly) assume that most other people accept it.”

Rose explained, “We often conform because we’re afraid of being embarrassed. Our stress levels rise at the thought of being mocked or viewed as incompetent, and when that happens, the fear-based part of the brain takes over.”

The choice to remain silent, to self-censor, is connected to the erroneous belief that by going along with the majority our “personal responsibility for our decisions” is diffused, “making it easier to bear mistakes.”

A person who values liberty understands the high costs of assuaging feelings by eschewing responsibility.

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, dissident, and the first president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism. In his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel explored the dynamics of mindlessly going along with prevailing sentiments. A grocery manager places in his shop window a sign: “Workers of the world, unite!” Havel revealed the manager placed the sign, not out of real support for the slogan, but to avoid “trouble” and “to get along in life.” No big deal, the manager may think: “It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee [me] a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society.’”

Havel’s shop manager hopes his sign signals, “I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

Havel wrote his essay in 1978. Could Havel have imagined that virtue signaling would be the norm in the West in 2023?

Had the sign read “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,” Havel reasoned, the grocer would not eagerly degrade his “dignity” by signaling his fear.

“Ideology,” Havel wrote, “is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”

Havel revealed a purpose in adopting an ideology you do not believe in: you can live under the “illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.”

Havel called this a “post-totalitarian system,” filled with “hypocrisy and lies,” in which “the lack of free expression [is claimed to be] the highest form of freedom.”

Havel was clear: to prop up hypocrisy and lies, we must behave as though we believe the lies. Individuals, he wrote, “confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

Havel kindled hope as he ended his essay: “The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?”

Mill, Havel, and Kundera all point us to a terrible truth: our moral weakness, desire to evade responsibility, and illusion that the majority makes right have led us down the slippery slope of forfeiting our freedom.

How do we respond to those working to undermine human rights? The solution is simple, but not without personal costs. Stop lying, stop degrading yourself, stop pretending to believe what you don’t, and resign from the role as an enabler of tyranny.

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

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Shadows on the Wall [A Start to Defeat Woke Tyranny]

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By Auguste Meyrat

With each new batch of the “Twitter Files,” it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Twitter censors were not only duplicitous scoundrels aiming to advance an agenda but also incompetents who failed to see the consequences of their actions. Whether it was suppressing the Hunter Biden story, shadow banning and de-amplifying popular conservative figures and certain medical professionals, and removing a sitting president of the United States from the platform, they convinced themselves that they were making the world a better place.

At no point did they seriously question themselves beyond violating their own rules. It never dawned on them that their constant gaslighting jeopardizes the freedom, health, and safety of all Americans. It seemed to matter little that they oversaw a platform that promised open public discourse but degenerated into a leftist propaganda outlet infested with bots and child pornography.

Not only did these censors do real damage at the bidding of a corrupt FBI but they ruined a potentially successful business. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, there were few real conversations happening on the platform, and Twitter was relatively small compared to other social media platforms. For the great majority of users, scrolling through one’s Twitter feed was never an enlightening, connective, or even fun experience but more a mindless habit to pass the time.

Seeing that this is the case, it’s fair to ask what really drove the moderators to do what they did. They could have easily let the First Amendment be their standard for content moderation and sipped their lattes while attending useless meetings. Why did they feel the need to risk their cushy careers by setting into motion a hostile takeover by Elon Musk and an incoming onslaught of lawsuits from users?

From any angle, this seems utterly foolish—that is, except from the woke angle. While rational actors would have understood the sheer destructiveness of censoring users without cause, facilitating the rigging of elections, and endangering the public by denying them important information on a pandemic, woke actors lack this capacity. They operate on feelings and self-regard, not evidence and logic.

Elon Musk famously called wokeness a “mind virus.” It infects people’s mental faculties and drives them to act and express themselves irrationally. Gad Saad expounds upon this in his book The Parasitic Mind. He bemoans the decline of academic scholarship and intellectual debate at today’s universities all in the name of establishing social justice. Of course, rather than create a more equitable and just world, the woke swarm only achieves the opposite—a world of unforgiving hierarchy and hypocrisy. But instead of learning from their failure, they double down and become ever more unreasonable.

For Saad, this is less an ideology and more an “idea pathogen.” In his scientific opinion, victims of wokeness specifically suffer from “Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome (OPS),” substituting for reality a fiction in which “science, reason, rules of causality, evidentiary thresholds, a near-infinite amount of data, data analytic procedures, inferential statistics, the epistemological rules inherent to the scientific method, rules of logic, historical patterns, daily patterns, and common sense are all rejected.”

Unfortunately it’s still an open question of how to “defeat wokeness,” as Elon Musk recently declared. Anyone who has experienced an encounter with the woke infected knows that exposing their falsehoods and contradictions (“sunlight is the best disinfectant,” or, in the new favored expression, “democracy dies in darkness”) only makes them sicker and more dangerous. This is why the “Twitter Files” have mostly elicited silence from the corporate media. Maybe a few of them are pleading the Fifth and hoping the story goes away, but it’s more likely that most don’t understand what these revelations mean, nor do they really care.

So does that mean that releasing and discussing the “Twitter Files” is worthless? Not at all. Even if it doesn’t cure the woke censors or their woke supporters, it fortifies the intellectual immune system of everyone else. Americans now know that they are not crazy; in truth, they are living through a new kind of totalitarianism where Big Tech platforms control speech, impose a social credit system, and fabricate overarching narratives out of thin air.

While this is not exactly a consoling thought, it’s at least the beginning of a solution. The problem has now been identified, and there are now enough informed members of society to have a constructive conversation about the issue. This in turn could lead to finding a cure to the woke pandemic. If these problems continue going ignored and unchecked, the civilized world will surely crumble into ruin, adopting the same chaos, stupidity, and hypocrisy inherent in today’s woke culture.

*****
This article was published by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

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DeSantis Goes to War

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By Thomas D. Klingenstein

On election night, I was half-watching Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s victory remarks when something quite extraordinary and encouraging caught my attention. DeSantis evoked Churchill’s “fighting on the beaches” speech, in which Churchill stirred the resolve and patriotism of the British people in anticipation of the invasion of their homeland by the Nazis. DeSantis, of course, was not warning against Nazism: he was warning against wokeism, which he was implicitly equating with Nazism. I had never heard a national political figure treat wokeism with such (deserved) gravity.

Before rephrasing Churchill, DeSantis said:

States and cities governed by leftist politicians have seen crime skyrocket. They’ve seen their taxpayers abused, they’ve seen medical authoritarianism imposed, and they’ve seen American principles discarded. The woke agenda has caused millions of Americans to leave these jurisdictions for greener pastures.

People do not uproot themselves and leave the rhythms of home “for light and transient causes.” These people are not coming to Florida just for the weather. They are fleeing the woke regime of blue America—an abusive, lawless, totalitarian regime which is waging war against American principles and the American way of life.

DeSantis continued:

Now, this great exodus of Americans, for those folks, Florida, for so many of them, has served as the promised land. We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.

In evoking Churchill’s speech, DeSantis lets us know that the woke regime is bearing down on America. In the urgent cadences of war, DeSantis tells us that America will not survive unless she defeats the woke regime. He believes this regime is so evil and powerful that he can, without bathos, compare it to the Nazi regime.

Some Unsolicited Advice

DeSantis has made a good start. He has told us that we are at war with a deadly regime, the woke regime. You cannot win a war unless you know you are in one.

But at some point soon, he must go further. He must show a voting majority of Americans that wokeism is the challenge of our generation, as Nazism was the challenge of the WWII generation and Communism for two generations thereafter.

And he must back up his claim. He has given us at least one piece of substantial evidence: in large numbers, people are fleeing their homes. Still, we need more. We shall not address the problem with the right strategies and people or the necessary resolve until we believe the country’s life truly is at stake. DeSantis needs to put America on a war footing.

In today’s environment, where there is a keen and deepening generalized awareness of danger, I think there is a hunger for a reasoned account of that danger. DeSantis’s most important role—the role of any statesman who is to rise to the historic challenge of this crisis—is to give such an account, one that calls a morally indifferent nation back to the principles of the founding.

So far as I can tell, there is no national Republican elected official who fully understands the threat except for Trump and DeSantis. The national figure not in politics who best gets it probably is Tucker Carlson. Night after night, in artful, insightful monologues, Carlson flays some aspect of the woke regime. He is the best we have, but he is not going to lead a major political movement. For that we need a statesman. That could well be DeSantis. And so I presume to offer him advice he hasn’t asked for:

He should make defeating wokeism his central purpose, with the goal of making it the central purpose of the Republican Party (which currently has no central purpose). Presumably DeSantis will run for the presidency. But even if he doesn’t, his first goal should be the mobilization of America. He should make anti-wokeism (and its opposite, pro-Americanism) the theme of the next Republican administration, whether it is his administration or not.

To develop an anti-woke (pro-American) agenda, DeSantis must first help us understand the woke regime, the woke way of life. He must explain that this way of life cannot possibly coexist with the American way of life. The two regimes have utterly irreconcilable understandings of a just society.

For the American regime, a just society is one in which free men and women pursue happiness according to their abilities and according to nature. Such a society is one where merit rules. For the woke regime, on the other hand, a just society is one where the regime imposes identity group quotas based on victimhood rankings. Such a regime makes war on merit.

It’s one regime or the other. You can’t offer admission to college (or anything else) according to group quotas and, at the same time, offer admission according to merit. I suggest DeSantis frame the debate accordingly: the merit regime vs. the group quota regime (or simply, merit vs. group quotas).

DeSantis should be very clear: woke revolutionaries attempt not to improve our culture, or remake aspects of it, but to destroy it or lead us to destroy it ourselves—not partially but completely. Like (crazed) revolutionaries everywhere, they believe the world must be purified, no matter the cost.

But DeSantis should not overestimate the threat either. The woke regime is a totalitarian regime in the making. Our side is outgunned almost everywhere, but there is still room to maneuver. America is not yet a one-party state; we still have some open communication channels; our intelligence agencies can (conceivably) be reformed; wokeness in the military can probably be reversed by a strong president, and businesses (one must hope!) will come around if they see America gaining the upper hand on woke tyranny. Even in education, where the woke revolutionaries have us tied to a chair, our hands are still free.

In addition to a framing, we need a simple theory or model of the woke regime: its composition, its goals, and the means for achieving those goals. Without a model we cannot anticipate where the woke revolutionaries are going next, and so we are always playing whack-a-mole, each new woke initiative catching us by surprise.

DeSantis might use the 2020 riots as an example of the woke regime in action. Radicals, intellectuals, media, businesses, Democratic politicians, and the criminal justice system conspired to create mayhem. They ignited, justified, hid, funded, fanned the flames of, and freed the rioters. There is no overarching organization. There is some informal coordination among players, but mostly the regime is a revolutionary cabal of the anti-American elite, who want us to believe they are liberating innocent victims.

The objective of the woke regime—group quotas—requires the woke revolutionaries to make Americans deeply ashamed of their past, thereby making them inclined to trade in the merit regime for the group quota regime. This requires a big lie. Every totalitarian regime has one. The woke regime’s big lie is that America is systemically racist and about to be overrun by racists, a.k.a. Trump voters. (That Trump voters are racist is, regrettably, a view also held by many neoconservatives.)

DeSantis should call this the “Big Lie” and, like Trump, dismiss it without apology or qualification. DeSantis should explain that the phony white guilt of the elite is killing the rest of us, black and white, that racism is low on the list of problems confronting black citizens, and, as Frederick Douglass counseled, the way to help blacks is to encourage them to help themselves.

DeSantis must tell Republicans they should forget about defending themselves against charges of “racism” (it cannot be done). Instead Republicans need to explain that the central problem facing the nation is not racism, but the trumped-up charges of racism that hound us from morning to night. The goal of conservatives should be, as David Azerrad has pointed out, “not to solve the race problem but to prevent the race problem from crushing the country.”

DeSantis needs to explain that the doctrinaire egalitarianism of wokesism denies the natural differences in abilities among people and so is evil. DeSantis should say just that: “evil.” Although the elite will cringe, as it did when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “evil,” most Americans will find it both bracing and reassuring.

In addition to telling lies, the woke revolutionaries must, as most everyone knows by now, censor anyone who challenges the lies. In a totalitarian regime there can be no space for dissent. This requires, among many other things, erasing from memory totalitarian regimes and their evil. DeSantis gets it. To his great credit, he signed a bill last year that requires the teaching of “communism and totalitarianism.”

Republicans recognize the Big Lie, censorship, and the corruption of education, but like many pieces of the woke regime, these are not usually seen as part of the larger woke strategy. We see the pieces but not always the picture. That’s DeSantis’s role: to put the pieces together.

DeSantis should make us understand all the woke regime’s actions through this totalitarian lens. Take, for example, Biden’s decision to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. The woke revolutionaries tell us this has to do with climate change, but it is difficult to see how destroying American energy independence can be other than part of an attempt to destroy America. Whether done with conscious intent or simply allowed to happen, the result is the same.

Or take open borders. We usher in millions of illegal immigrants, distribute them around the country, encourage them not to assimilate, and sometimes even allow them to vote. This too is an attempt to destroy our country with the additional benefit for the woke revolutionaries of swelling Democratic voting rolls. Another example is the breaking of the country into identity groups (tribes), each competing for the highest ranking in the victimhood sweepstakes. This will almost certainly lead to tribal warfare. When has it not?

Yes, Republican politicians usually object to such policies. But they don’t generally identify and denounce them as parts of the woke strategy for destroying our country. Unless they do, we will lose our country without even a fight.

A Time for Statesmanship

DeSantis should help us follow the logic of wokeism. For example, if we know group quotas for innocent victims is the goal of the woke regime, then we know that the woke revolutionaries need to bring the black prison population (currently about 33 percent of the total prison population) more in line with blacks’ percentage of the overall population (13 percent). That is the purpose of defunding the police and failing to prosecute certain crimes and other criminal justice “reforms.” For the most part, people with common sense—in particular black Americans who must endure the consequences in their own neighborhoods—see these things simply as very stupid ideas. But DeSantis should keep reminding us that wokeism is not a jumble of stupid ideas but a coherent set of stupid ideas in the service of the group quota regime, one that is completely at odds with the merit regime.

And DeSantis should help us anticipate the woke revolutionaries’ next steps. In the case of prison population, the next step might be disparate sentencing, where blacks get lighter sentences than whites for the same offense, or perhaps the elimination of prison altogether. As loopy as these ideas sound, they are logical extensions of woke theory. Moreover, each has been talked about by leading woke revolutionary intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi. Sometimes all we have to do is listen.

Very importantly, DeSantis must keep reminding us that war requires different strategies than peace time. War is not a time for trying to persuade the independents, reach across the aisle, or even reach out to the Republican accommodationists. DeSantis knows the best way to get these groups on board is not to woo them but to win the war. He knows as well that any concessions made to the woke revolutionaries will be pocketed, not reciprocated—something even Trump may have failed to fully appreciate.

War also requires different personnel. Trump, an almost unthinkable option at any other time in American history, was the right man for these times, and may still be the right man. Trump was a great war time president. DeSantis must help us understand that Trump’s flaws were not—perhaps are still not—disqualifying.

The easy way out for Republicans, and the temptation for DeSantis, will be to say Trump’s policies were good, but not the rest of him. I think this assessment of Trump is wrong. As I have written elsewhere, Trump advanced many important policies, but the “rest of him” is where one finds the virtues that have inspired a movement. His willingness to fight, his abundant courage, strength, independence, optimism, confidence in America, and absence of white guilt are examples of virtues that made him both effective and dear to patriotic Americans. DeSantis should resist his advisors who tell him he should not speak well of Trump. Now is the time for statesmanship.

And when the Republican establishment dismisses the Trump movement as “populist,” DeSantis should demur and explain to that establishment that when the elite undermines the American way of life, and the voices of ordinary people cannot be heard, populism is not only healthy but vital. Trump’s populist base has just what the Republican Party lacks: purpose, the passion that can match the ideological zeal of the woke revolutionaries, optimism, and confidence in itself and the country. And the base doesn’t have what the party has altogether too much of: white guilt. Trump’s base is a fighting force we cannot afford to lose.

In his election night victory speech DeSantis imagined that he, like Churchill, was a great leader fighting the forces of evil. If DeSantis is to actually follow Churchill (and Lincoln), he must be magnanimous, as they were. Voters will rally to magnanimity coupled with courage and resolution.

DeSantis’s immediate goal is to make America vs. the woke regime (merit vs. group quotas) the central theme of American political discourse. Perhaps that begins with a speech. Like Churchill and Lincoln, DeSantis should appeal to our patriotism in order to stir our resolve. We are still a patriotic people. Where patriotism has waned, I suspect its embers would burst into flames. DeSantis must remind us we are part of a noble and honorable tradition. He must call attention to the great successes of our past. In doing so he reminds us that we are still capable of greatness. As in times before, the future of freedom everywhere rests on our shoulders, a fateful burden we carry as the “almost” chosen people. DeSantis must give us hope but not let us forget the possibility of darkness. As a peroration, he cannot improve on Lincoln who faced a crisis not so dissimilar to the one we face today:

LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

*****
This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

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What the January 6 Videos Will Show

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By Julie Kelly

The jury trial of Richard Barnett, the man famously photographed with his feet on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6, 2021, is underway in Washington, D.C. Nearly two years to the date of his arrest, Barnett finally had a chance to defend himself in court on multiple charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding.

But it was not the fiery, outspoken Barnett who provided the most jaw-dropping testimony in the trial so far. To the contrary, one of the government’s own witnesses confirmed under defense cross-examination that “agents provocateur” were heavily involved in instigating the events of January 6.

Captain Carneysha Mendoza, a tactical commander for U.S. Capitol Police at the time, testified Wednesday how a group of agitators destroyed security barriers and lured people to Capitol grounds that afternoon:

Defense Counsel Brad Geyer: Isn’t it true that you had a lot of people, a large quantity of people walking down two streets that dead-ended at the Capitol?

Mendoza: Yes, sir.

Geyer: And would it be fair to say that at least at some of the leading edges of that crowd, they contained bad people or provocateurs; is that fair?

Mendoza: It’s fair.

Geyer: Dangerous people?

Mendoza: Yes.

Geyer: Violent people?

Mendoza: Yes.

Geyer: Highly trained violent people?

Mendoza: Yes.

Geyer: Highly trained violent people who work and coordinate together?

Mendoza: Yes

It was a stunning admission, representing the first time a top law enforcement official stated under oath (to my knowledge) that a coordinated, experienced group of agitators engaged in much of the mischief early that day. Under further questioning, Mendoza acknowledged those same individuals “pushed through barriers, removed barriers, threw barriers over the side, removed fencing, and eased the flow of people into places where they shouldn’t be.” This happened around 1:00 p.m., the same time the joint session of Congress convened to debate the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Hiding the pivotal role of still unidentified—and uncharged—agitators on January 6 is just one reason why the government has successfully sought to conceal thousands of hours of footage captured by the Capitol police’s security system before, during, and after the protest.

As I explained in May 2021, Capitol police immediately designated roughly 14,000 hours of surveillance video as “security information” that should not be released to the public.

Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for Capitol police, the technical owner of the video trove, signed an affidavit in March 2021 objecting to the widespread dissemination of footage “related to the attempted insurrection.” DiBiase claimed the agency wanted to prevent “those who might wish to attack the Capitol again” from accessing interior views of the building.

The Department of Justice subsequently labeled the footage as “highly sensitive government material” subject to strict protective orders in court proceedings. Defendants must comply with onerous rules before viewing any surveillance video associated with their case.

There are, of course, exceptions for any party helping to enforce the “insurrection” narrative. For example, the House committee handling Donald Trump’s post-January 6 impeachment was allowed to use portions of the super-secret reel. So, too, was HBO in producing its January 6 documentary. The January 6 select committee aired extensive if highly selective surveillance footage during their televised performances.

And that brief clip of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running in a hallway on January 6? It was clearly an image intended to mock his alleged cowardice that day. And, of course, it was Capitol surveillance video.

If it’s safe to place the video in the hands of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the biggest deceiver in Congress, and random HBO film producers, then it’s safe to place all the footage in the hands of the American people. Which is why calls by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to fully release the surveillance video are a welcome, and necessary, step in providing a complete account about the events of January 6 to the public.

(The Committee on House Administration, now under Republican control, is one of two congressional committees with access to the full library of video.)

The recordings, Gaetz said in an interview this week, “would give more full context to that day rather than the cherry-picked moments that the January 6 committee tried to use to inflame and further divide our country.”

That demand undoubtedly will be met with fierce resistance by the same lawmakers, government agencies, and media organizations incessantly bleating about the need to “tell the truth” about what happened before and on January 6.

So, what exactly will the tapes reveal?

The footage, which captured the inside and outside of the building, will show how many agitators and/or federal assets were staged at various locations early in the day. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) might finally get an answer to the question that FBI Director Christopher Wray refused to answer during a congressional hearing last year—whether FBI informants disguised as Trump supporters were planted inside the building prior to the initial breach.

To that end, the video could show who instructed two men how to open the two-ton Columbus Doors on the east side of the Capitol Building, creating an access point for hordes of protesters. Ditto for entry points at other locations.

Will the video identify the individuals who erected the “gallows” featuring an orange noose allegedly built to “hang” Vice President Mike Pence? Just like the identity of the suspect who allegedly planted the pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC, no one has been identified or charged with constructing that stage on government property—another unanswered question the footage will answer.

The public undoubtedly will be shocked to see police officers from Capitol police and D.C. Metropolitan Police Departments viciously attacking crowds of people assembled outside the Capitol. Mendoza’s testimony also confirmed that Capitol police officers used nonlethal “munitions” on hundreds of individuals beginning shortly after 1:00 p.m. Weaponry included pepper balls—projectiles containing a chemical irritant shot from a launcher similar to a paintball gun—gas, rubber bullets, and flashbangs, a less-than-lethal grenade that likely caused the fatal heart attacks of two Trump supporters that afternoon.

Not only will the public see what happened to those two men, Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips, but they will also see evidence of the numerous, serious injuries inflicted on dozens of people, including children and elderly women, at the hands of police. Are Americans prepared to see how law enforcement handled the dead bodies of Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland?

It will be tough to watch.

More importantly, the footage will indicate which cameras were disabled before the protest. The government’s claim that security cameras are not installed outside the Columbus Doors is questionable at best. A full comparison between the Capitol’s closed-circuit television system and the cameras operable on January 6 is a must.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Thursday endorsed Gaetz’s calls to release the footage. “I think the American public should actually see all what happened,” McCarthy told reporters. “Yes, I’m engaged to do that.”

If McCarthy follows through on his promise, the world will see the biggest inside job—an actual coup—in U.S. history unfold before their eyes. Not only is it necessary to expose the truth of January 6 but to exonerate innocent Americans whose lives have been destroyed in the aftermath.

Roll the tapes.

*****
This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

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The Long Odds of Solving the Budget Crisis

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By Neland Nobel

The budgetary crisis in the US has reached a critical phase. The debt ceiling fight about to unfold will simply be the latest phase.

Experts say it is irresponsible to “play a game of chicken” with the debt ceiling. In the past, this means, Congress should increase the debt limit without resistance.

The Democrat Congress has played a game of chicken with a blowout budget and now we will be told the only reasonable thing to do is fund it. But the debt ceiling can be used as a lever to get spending concessions. To use it in this way is considered by Democrats as more dangerous than excessive spending. Is it really worse than a giant omnibus bill passed in the dead of night? A bill, hardly anyone even read? Are all previous spending decisions forever untouchable? Under pressure, can’t Congress go back and cut some spending? If Congress was balancing the budget we would not have to raise the debt ceiling in the first place. Let that last point sink in.

Is not raising the debt ceiling like facilitating a “spendaholic” and giving him the booze for another bender? Unlike the failed attempt to stop the spending done last session, the new Republican House majority will not be frozen out of the process.

It is too bad it comes down to this but every previous attempt to restrain spending has failed so why not use this tool for leverage to get some budgetary sanity? It is only because of a lack of alternatives that we find ourselves where we are in this process.

Yes, it runs the risk of destabilizing markets and politics but so does national bankruptcy. It is only a question of when we get destabilized.

As we recently pointed out,  we now have a series of positive, self-feeding feedback loops operating simultaneously and largely outside of normal political control. Any one of these trends such as the increase in interest costs or the demographic crisis hitting Social Security would be sufficient cause for alarm. But to have so many negative trends operating at the same time is really quite unique and dangerous.

The political machine in the US certainly has tried on occasion to restrain itself but deficit spending has been the norm since the mid-1960s with the adoption of the Great Society. Much of the expansion of government is simply an extension of that original idea. And the Great Society itself was an addition to FDR’s New Deal.

Some may fondly remember the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which briefly gave us a short interlude of balanced budgets because Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich had some maneuvering room after the end of the Cold War. Then there was Pay Go, a Congressional rule that any party suggesting an increase had to show from whence they would get the money. And remember the spending caps? Congress has broken free of all of these attempts to restrain them.

Nothing tried previously has worked, in part because America decided that they desired a very large and very expensive government. After a few budget surplus years in the late 1990s, we got back to the long-term deficit spending trend which has now reached the parabolic stage. That is why the debt ceiling fight is now so important. There may not really be an alternative to having this fight right now.

Conservatives and Libertarians see government playing a diminished role in the personal life of Americans, greater freedom, greater personal responsibility, and a smaller and less expensive government. Except for funds to defend the homeland and run the courts and the like, they see a small  Federal Government. The bulk of the social safety net should be on a state level because states must balance their budgets because they don’t have the power to print and borrow as does the Federal government. Further, if states become too oppressive, citizens can move.

As attractive as we think that vision is, it has not been embraced by the American people for a long time. Pitting self-responsibility against free stuff from the government has been hard to sell.

Some say it is because we have done a poor job of explaining our vision and the consequences of progressivism. It is true we have been shut out of institutions such as schools, the clergy, and the mainstream press.  It does not alter the outcome. We are losing.

We think it goes deeper than even that.Our voice is being heard, maybe not to the extent we think it should.  But the sad fact is the public is not buying what we have been selling. Americans have not wanted a small government and self-responsibility. They want a welfare state. They want to be taken care of and they don’t want to pay for it.

Progressives and Liberals want an almost total government with a government providing welfare, healthcare, education, child subsidies, a huge military for international intrigue, changing the climate of the earth, reformulating families and sexual relationships, a national security state, and a censorship state, a reparations state, a union with both labor and capital in a fascist like structure. Government should play a role in every aspect of life and individuals are to be cared for by the state.

This by its nature, requires a huge and expensive government. Democrats remain convinced it can be funded by taxing the rich, without negative consequences to productivity and incentives. They also maintain the fiction that all this can be achieved without compulsion.

Rolling debt out to the future plays into the Progressives’ hands. They get to promise the benefit and the cost is pushed mysteriously onto everyone through inflation and the debt onto future generations No wonder the American people think a welfare state can be a free lunch.

The Progressive view has largely prevailed, and the conservative forces have put up ineffectual rear guard action.  We have not convinced people this financial shell game will end in ruin.

Democrats have their own internal divisions but they are much less consequential. Democrats largely move lockstep with one another and centrist elements have largely been purged from the party.

So-called nonpartisan organizations such as the Concord Coalition, The National Taxpayers Union, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget crank out very interesting commentary and statistics but they too have also been ineffectual at stopping the spending and the piling up of debt.  

In the end, the American people are largely at fault for desiring the warm embrace of government payments without the real desire to pay for it. They wish to borrow production from the future for the benefit of today, largely forgetting what burden they leave on future generations.

Sadly, it seems no amount of argument seems able to innoculate us from the very real human foible of wanting things for free. Get what you can for yourself, as long as someone else is paying for it. It never dawns on many who that someone else would likely be.

We are sorry to reach such a dour conclusion but even if we are wrong, we are likely now too far along in the process to stop it before serious consequences hit.

The hope is the coming financial crisis itself will awaken many of the problems and the crisis itself will be the catalyst to finally get reforms that put America back on a sound financial path. However, the pain of such a crisis is no guarantee the political ball will bounce our way. Often such crises simply make the government even bigger and more draconian because the crisis will require self-responsibility from a population that has forgotten what that is.

Educating the public is the best way to ensure the political ball bounces into the possession of those wanting freedom and limited government and that it does not bounce into the hands of those that want total government intervention.

In that regard, the Concord Coalition put together a list of lessons after observing years of budget battles that the American people need to understand.

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The Great Reset and Its Critics: The Technocrats

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By Michael Watson

In mid-2020, after COVID-19 and lockdown policies to (unsuccessfully) stop it had spread across the world, the World Economic Forum (WEF) leader Klaus Schwab, along with the man now known as King Charles III of the United Kingdom, announced the Forum’s “Great Reset Initiative” to guide a state-managed, environmentalist, and corporate-aligned reconstruction of the world economy. Schwab built on the initiative with a book co-authored with French economist Thierry Malleret titled COVID-19: The Great Reset. In their book, they made predictions about how the pandemic and ruling regime it ushered in would “reset” society to the benefit of environmentalism and management of the economy by a concert of state and “stakeholder.” The sequel, The Great Narrative, proposed an approach to selling the WEF’s reset agenda based on Schwab and Malleret’s discussions with 50 mostly left-wing, mostly academic thinkfluencers; It calls for more global governance. The radicalism of the “reset”—it’s right there in the name—and the influence of Schwab and the WEF, have elicited firm opposition.

Few quotes stick in the conservative or libertarian craw. quite like the infamous musing of incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to President Barack Obama, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” For Emanuel, the Obama administration, and Democrats’ generational-scale majorities in both houses of Congress, that meant enacting the fiscal stimulus, a then-outrageous $787 billion boondoggle of building projects; regulatory legislation like the Dodd-Frank banking act; and Obamacare, the statist restructuring of health care finance.

The Technocrats

But the quote sticks because the impulse is far from Emanuel’s alone. Nothing in the COVID-19 pandemic period so vividly demonstrated the impulse “to do things that you think you could not do before” as the name given to a project launched at a 2020 virtual conference of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the think tank and business league based in Europe best known for hosting the annual Davos meetings at which international politicians and corporate bigwigs lay out their visions for the world.

That name was “The Great Reset.” Demonstrating the WEF’s influence over a European metropolitan left-leaning sort, the project was launched by Klaus Schwab, the German academic who has led the WEF and been a leading opponent of shareholder primacy in corporate governance since 1971, and then-Prince of Wales, now King Charles III of the United Kingdom. The project, in the words of International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva, aspires to frame the emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic in the creation of “a greener, smarter, fairer world.”

Later in 2020, Schwab and French economist Thierry Malleret published COVID-19: The Great Reset­, a book-length examination of the changes in society the authors presumed were likely to happen and perhaps desirable as a result of the pandemic. Increased power of the state and left-wing activism were presumed certain; rapid adoption of environmentalist-aligned, “stakeholder”-influenced corporate practices was presumed to be a necessity.

Schwab has opposed “shareholder primacy,” the view that corporate management owes shareholders the greatest profits that can be obtained in obedience to law and custom, since the 1970s. Like the financial crisis of 2008 did for Emanuel’s American Democrats, the crisis created by the COVID pandemic and the unprecedented-in-modern-times attempts to suppress it offers Schwab and the WEF the opportunity to press home their environmentalist and statist goals.

But can central planners remake a world that they cannot accurately predict? From the perspective at the turn of 2023, many of Schwab and Malleret’s predictions of the world that COVID would bring into being have not come to pass, perhaps none more crucially than one on page 70: “At this current juncture [mid-2020], it is hard to imagine how inflation could pick up anytime soon.”

Schwab and Malleret’s sequel to COVID-19: The Great Reset, titled The Great Narrative, does little to diminish such suspicions. The “narrative” is essentially a repackaging of the same warmed-over environmentalist tropes all have heard before with little connection to the actual production of things, which makes sense given that the book is based on discussions with 50 global thinkfluencers or government officials, not with industrialists or even manufacturing-trades labor unionists. The result is a mix of technocratic gibberish and Greenpeace-in-a-suit environmentalism with the solutions for “a better future” having little to offer the Western middle and working classes beyond handwaving about a “just transition” and promises that weather-dependent energy technologies are much more stable and productive than traditional fuels. (Just ask Europeans trying to heat their homes amid an energy crisis how well that claim has aged.)

The authors’ barely veiled desire to exploit the COVID crisis to pursue left-wing ends has provoked alarm and responses, at least two of book length. ClimateDepot.com publisher and longtime critic of environmentalism Marc Marono released The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown while Michael Walsh released a compilation of essays tiled Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. Both focus less on Schwab’s “reset” itself than the broader agenda of ski-chalet environmentalism and chardonnay socialism popular with the professional-managerial technocratic class that is overrepresented at World Economic Forum gatherings and among the speakers at TED Talks. The right-leaning opponents’ fears are summarized in a line from a pre-COVID-era WEF video on predictions for the world in 2030: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

The WEF is adamant that it does not advocate this; the line is derived from an op-ed by a Danish Social Democratic politician published by the WEF that is headlined, “I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better.” Many would still respectfully dissent from such a vision.

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

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The Manic Methods of Mad Democrats

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By Victor Davis Hanson

We are faced with a revolutionary party well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans—and it feels that it has created the means to do it.

For all Joe Biden’s talk about “semi-fascist” and “un-American,” “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, it is the Democratic Party that has far more radically changed. It is descended into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. How it proceeds with that agenda is now as entirely predictable as it is creepy.

Election Warping
Before any presidential or midterm election, strict news suppression ensures that all bad news will follow, not precede, the voting. The Twitter files, Project Veritas ambush interviews, the Podesta emails, and occasional left-wing braggadocio like Molly Ball’s now infamous post-2020 election revelations in Time magazine, confirm the fusion between the media and the Democratic Party.

To the degree there is any independent journalistic inquiry about Biden—such as we are only now seeing with Biden’s security violations—it is likely only because the party wants the 80-year-old enfeebled Biden out of office.

The Democratic-media-deep-state nexus quashed all 2020 pre-election revelations about the embarrassing Hunter Biden laptop. Its contents more or less proved that the Biden family was corrupt.

Twitter and Facebook confessionals show how, in lapdog fashion, social media forbade coverage of the truth about the laptop. More than 50 former intelligence officers, organized by the confessed liars John Brennan and James Clapper—both of whom have admitted to deceiving Congress while under oath—used their former titles to fortify the pre-election lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely Russian disinformation.

A poll conducted after the election revealed that those voters who knew of the story might have changed their vote had they known the truth. Neither Clapper nor Brennan nor any of their subordinates has ever apologized. Their lack of contriteness recalls the late Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) post-election brag about his effective pre-election lies concerning candidate Mitt Romney’s taxes: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

Joe Biden, his lawyers, and the Justice Department likely knew that Biden had violated national security laws surrounding classified documents. Yet they suppressed that information until the 2022 midterms were over. The same is true of the pre-midterm news blackout of the massive fraud of mega-Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried. In close Senate races, where Democrats often referenced the Mar-a-Lago, it might well have mattered if they were confronted with Biden’s Garage-gate scandal, and the Madoff-like albatross of the obnoxious Bankman-Fried and his enabling family.

The list of 2022 pre-election gambits is endless. Biden offered amnesties for both student-loan debt payments and federal marijuana convictions. But perhaps the most flagrant Biden pre-midterm contortion was his sudden interest in flooding markets with oil and gas, hitherto reduced in supply within the United States due to his own green handlers.

Biden requested the Saudis to postpone OPEC cutbacks until after the election. Prior to the midterms, he begged illiberal regimes like Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to pump more oil as well. They were not keen to help him out, so, in the weeks leading up to the midterms, Biden began draining millions of barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to reduce gasoline prices, even as he lied that his own policies were bringing down oil and natural gas prices. Then shortly after the midterms, Biden announced he would cease drawing down the reserve that was banked at low prices under Trump and instead would buy a few million barrels at sky-high prices.

Since the election’s conclusion, he has been silent about concerns for the voter’s gasoline and natural gas price woes. Why the change?

Projection
The Democratic Left has mastered the art of projection. Most of their own nefarious activity (now soon to be revealed) will be recalibrated as the crimes of their opponents.

Hillary Clinton used three firewalls to conceal her employment of the fabulist Christopher Steele. He, in turn, never set foot in Russia to do any research. Instead, Steele, via money from the Clinton stream, enlisted a Moscow-based Clintonite Charles Dolan and Russian Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko, either to invent fantasies, or pass on real Russian disinformation.

Clintonites in and out of government then released the resulting concocted “dossier” to the media on the eve of the 2016 election, supposedly proving that Trump was, as James Clapper would later lie again, “A Russian asset.”

In truth, Hillary was a colluding conduit for Russian disinformation and tried to warp the election by spreading Steele’s lies among top government officials to lend authority to preplanned media leaks, as the FBI deceived FISA court judges to spy on Clinton’s political opponents.

Then we come to election denialism, which began in earnest in 2000 when, almost immediately after the final Florida count, the Democratic National Committee pushed the lie that the Electoral College vote was illegitimate, and George W. Bush was “selected not elected.” In 2004 it was Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) turn. She, along with the recent chairman of the January 6 committee, U.S. Representative Benny Thompson (D-Miss.) and 31 other House members, voted to refuse to accept the Electoral College vote from Ohio.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton led the charge that Trump was “illegitimate” and had stolen the election. She never recanted and was soon joined by scores of Democratic officials, including perennial election-denier former President Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden. Her surrogates like Jill Stein sued to invalidate the election on the premise that computers were rigged, while has-been Hollywood actors peddled videos begging the electors to renounce their state popular vote tallies.

As a rule, leftists who most ardently denied the 2016 election—current House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is the most notorious example—were the most vigorous in attacking conservatives for “denying” the 2020 election.

Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election by more than 50,000 votes but who described herself as the “real” governor, created a lucrative career barnstorming the country and lecturing Democratic audiences about how “voter suppression” had “robbed” her of the governorship.

Since 2000, as a general truism, the only presidential elections Democrats did not deny were those they won.

Suppression
We now know that prominent Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), along with the FBI, successfully used Twitter and Facebook to ban bothersome news stories and silence political opponents. The locus classicus of such efforts was the left-wing banning of the president of the United States from social media platforms while Iranian theocrats, ISIS, and the Taliban freely used them.

The reading public is only now learning through the Twitter disclosures of the accurate Nunes House Intelligence Committee majority memo, and the utterly fraudulent Schiff minority version—truth that was self-evident, but mostly suppressed by the media.

Again, Molly Ball outlined how Silicon Valley poured hundreds of millions into selected precincts to warp the voting turnout, how it suppressed unwelcome news, how the Democratic elite modulated the 2020 violent street demonstrations to fit Biden’s advantage, and how corporate America help to fund and advance what she called variously a “cabal” and a “conspiracy.”

Changing the Rules
It is hard to determine any major constitutional norms or long-held customs and traditions the new Jacobin Party has not sought to alter or junk to its own advantage. Remember there is no consistent policy concerning any of these proposed changes. Radical demands for reforms from the Left hinge only on their perceived short-term temporary political advantage.

In the House, Democrats destroyed the old idea that the minority leader was granted his own party’s selections to serve on congressional committees simply to stack the January 6 committee. They also recalibrated congressional House subpoenas as matters of criminality and staged performance-art arrests of anyone who resisted—the antithesis to the manner in which the subpoena denier and former Attorney General Eric Holder simply ignored all summons with impunity.

Jacobins normalized the idea of impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost the House, and to conduct such a proceeding without a special counsel’s report or serious cross examinations. They also introduced the new idea of impeaching a president twice, and then once he left office to try him as a private citizen in the Senate.

Thanks to Democrats, we have a new custom of raiding a former president’s private home in search of classified presidential papers, on the allegation that said president had not yet used his legal authority to declassify them.

The Democrats predictably want to end the filibuster and destroy the Electoral College—but predicated in the former case only on whether they currently enjoy a Senate majority, and in the latter only when it lost the Electoral College vote but won the popular balloting.

The Democrats wish to bring Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. into statehood. Were it a matter of adding new conservative states, and with them four additional conservative senators, they would abort the idea in its infancy.

They want to stack the court by enlarging it to 15 justices. Had any conservative voiced such “reforms” during the heyday of the Warren Court, he would have been denounced as an insurrectionist nut.

To ensure nationwide outlawing of voter IDs, Democrats tried to pass a national voting law to surpass the constitutional directive that the primary responsibility to establish voting laws remains with the states.

In just four years, the Left engineered the most radical changes in voting laws in U.S. history. The result was that in many states, under the excuse of COVID, some 70 percent of the electorate did not vote on Election Day—even as the rejection rate of improper non-Election Day balloting plunged.

The Left clamored for extended balloting because it had mastered the arts of mass-mailing absentee ballots, third-party ballot harvesting, ballot curing, and relaxing rules on authenticating addresses, and signatures, and matching ballots with registrars’ lists.

Asymmetries
One overriding principle of the new Democratic Party is asymmetry—or the notion that the Left’s moral superiority earns absolute exemption from the very methods they employ against their opponents.

Disproportionality explains why the historic Mar-a-Lago raid was constructed in bogus fashion as a legitimate search for “nuclear codes.” Yet it would have sparked outrage had the FBI, on rumors of Biden sloppiness, sent armed agents into Jill Biden’s underwear drawers looking for classified papers concerning Ukraine and Iran, or towed away Joe Biden’s Corvette to get access to a garage full of unlawfully stored classified papers, or strewn Biden’s papers across the floor for an FBI concocted photo-op.

The buffoonish protestors and rioters of January 6 were to be jailed for months without formal charges, put in solitary confinement, and often sentenced to the maximum punishment possible. But the rioters, shooters, and killers of 120 days of mayhem and violence during summer 2020 were calibrated as “summer of love” rowdies. Antifa and Black Lives Matter sort of, kind of got a little bit out of hand in torching a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C. church, as well as trying to storm the White House grounds, sending the president into an underground bunker.

That Antifa and BLM plotted much of their anarchy and violence on social media unimpeded was unremarked upon. That fact mattered not at all in comparison to the illegal paraders and rioters of January 6. Police who shoot unarmed protestors usually have their identities immediately revealed; yet when they lethally shoot the likes of an Ashli Babbitt, their identities are suppressed, and their questionable conduct lauded.

The Left destroyed the southern border to attract 5 million illegal-alien and impoverished future constituents from Mexico and former Third World Latin American and Caribbean countries. Had conservatives fast-tracked a massive legal immigration program to attract 5 million skilled and degreed immigrants from Europe or the former British commonwealth, the Left would have gone berserk in their cries of “racist,” and their current “demography is destiny” boasts suddenly would be replaced by the slur of “Great Replacement Theory.”

Donald Trump was deemed crazy. A Yale physiatrist made the rounds on television and in Congress to claim he needed an intervention and straitjacket. The FBI and an interim attorney general discussed wearing a wire to entrap Donald Trump and convince his cabinet he was nuts. If the FBI and the Justice Department did the same to Joe Biden, the Left would have claimed a coup was in progress.

Ditto if a major former Bush official wrote, in Rosa Brooks fashion, 11 days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, that he should be removed by either the 25th Amendment, impeachment—or a military coup.

Would anything be comparable to the twisted genre of murderous fantasies among has-been politicians, Twitter creatures, and grade-C actors—competing to dream up how Biden should be torched, stabbed, decapitated, hanged, dismembered, and shot, in the manner of the four-year venom from Trump haters? Would the FBI investigate all that if there were?

What would the Left have done if a conservative version of Madonna had screamed on Inauguration Day that she dreamed of blowing up the White House, as rioters flooded D.C. streets?

Joe Biden daily forgets where he is and what he is doing. Someday historians will fault those who knowingly used a non compos mentis septuagenarian, without regard for the interests of the American people, to mask a radical neo-socialist agenda.

Biden shakes imaginary hands. He insists his son died in Iraq. In his mind, Brian Sicknick was murdered on January 6. In Walter Mitty-style, he brags that he has been a semi-truck driver, an arrested civil rights activist, a major college football prospect, a U.S. Naval Academy scholarship prospect, and on and on. If Biden was given the Montreal Cognitive Test, as was Trump, he would likely flunk it outright.

Conservatives should be aware that they are not dealing with the party of JFK and LBJ. The Democratic Party has nothing in common with the agendas of a slick Bill Clinton and is well beyond the “fundamental transformations” of arch-narcissist Barack Obama.

We are faced with a strictly disciplined, no-nonsense revolutionary party, well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans. And it feels that it has now created the means to do it.

*****
This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

IT WAS ALL PLANNED: Tactical Commander for US Capitol Police Admits Under Oath that “Agitators” Who Were “Highly Trained” Ripped Down Fencing Prior to Protest at US Capitol on Jan. 6 thumbnail

IT WAS ALL PLANNED: Tactical Commander for US Capitol Police Admits Under Oath that “Agitators” Who Were “Highly Trained” Ripped Down Fencing Prior to Protest at US Capitol on Jan. 6

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By Jim Hoft

We’ve known for two years numerous federal operatives were involved in the January 6, 2021 protests.

On Sunday night, Julie Kelly from American Greatness, along with several J6 prisoners, conservatives reporters, j6 family members, and even liberal trolls, joined in the “J6 Truth Exposed” Twitter Space hosted by The Gateway Pundit.

During the discussion author and investigative reporter Julie Kelly dropped a bomb from J-6 defendant Richard Barnett’s jury trial last week.

Julie discussed new evidence she wrote about in her latest column at American Greatness – Captain Carneysha Mendoza, a tactical commander for U.S. Capitol Police at the time, admitted under oath last week that a group of “agitators” who were “highly trained” destroyed security barriers and lured people to Capitol grounds that day.

This is something we reported on before. Who were the mysterious people who arrived early at the US Capitol and took down all of the fencing and barriers while President Donald Trump was still talking at the Ellipse a mile away?…..

*****

Continue reading this article at The Gateway Pundit.

Why Only 16% of Gen Z Are Proud to Be an American, and What We Should Do About It thumbnail

Why Only 16% of Gen Z Are Proud to Be an American, and What We Should Do About It

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By Jarrett Stepman

Only 16% of Gen Zers are “proud” to live in the United States.

That finding comes from a recent Morning Consult poll, which assessed generational attitudes about the United States. The poll shows that there has been roughly a 20-percentage-point drop of pride in country every generation since the Baby Boomers, 73% of whom express pride in the country.

Many on social media noted with exasperation that those who say they have no pride in country are in no hurry to move somewhere else.

It’s true, our success as a nation has apparently led to a great deal of ingratitude and navel-gazing. However, the poll points to a deeper problem.

Even if the poll is off or exaggerated, it’s hard to ignore the reality and the trend. With each passing generation, there’s less connection to country and less patriotism. With this comes enormous—and likely terrible—implications.

First, for those insistent on upholding the “liberal international order,” as some call it, that’s going to be hard to do when so few people are willing to support or defend even their own nation. It also should come as no surprise that the military is having a recruitment crisis. Could you imagine what would happen if we had to reinstate the draft?

Second, with less attachment to country, there will be fewer things to bind people together in a society that is now ruthlessly sorting out ideologically.

In earlier times, we could argue about issues and policies, but accept that our neighbor was still fundamentally American. But as the philosophical gaps among us widen, and political victories and defeats become a zero-sum game, there is less incentive to maintain and defend the rights of the other “tribe.”

President Donald Trump said in his inaugural address that “when you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” In a society devoid of patriotism, there will be a whole lot of room to hate.

So, the question is, why is this happening? To me, the answer seems clear.

We’ve failed to reinstitutionalize “informed patriotism” in this country. That’s what President Ronald Reagan called for in his farewell address in January 1989, and what was clearly most important to him. In the 1980s, the U.S. was riding high, the economy was booming, patriotism was returning, the Soviet Union—an evil empire, if there ever was one—was just a few years away from collapse. It was morning again in America.

However, Reagan warned that while the policy victories he achieved during his presidency were good, it wasn’t nearly enough.

Reagan said that “younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children.” But it wasn’t just parents. For those who created popular culture, “well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style.”

He warned that while our “spirit” was back, we hadn’t “reinstitutionalized it.”

Reagan was right. Worse—as it’s now become quite clear—we have institutionalized something quite different from “informed patriotism” and love of country. We have institutionalized the ethos of the new left, of the woke, of the purveyors of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Concepts such as critical race theory and radical gender theory are quite real, but they aren’t new. They’ve been floating around academia for more than half a century. What’s new is that these ideas have reached a critical mass, and they have pushed traditional American ideas out of every institution they’ve taken hold of.

Many Americans have no idea what the details of these concepts are, but they absorb and internalize them because they are continuously reinforced. The modern elite university is the temple of this new, dominant ideology, but its tentacles reach into everything, from colleges to K-12 schools (both public and private) to media and entertainment, to the corporate world, and certainly to government.

At one time, the managerial class merely promoted its interests; now, it promotes this quasi-religion, too.

To remain a member of the elite in good standing, you must acknowledge your faith in the new creed or risk losing your career, being canceled, and personally attacked.

Most comply. Those who don’t believe do so quietly, secretly for fear of risking their status and livelihood.

Is that freedom?

Reagan also said that every generation had to reaffirm our American principles, or we would someday have to tell our children what it was like when men were free. Have we not reached that point?

And if you tell your children about a time when Americans were freer in the past, can you do so without being called a racist?

Victory in the Cold War, a moment of triumph for the United States and the West worthy of celebration, nevertheless concealed the rot within.

In 2020, when mobs hit the streets and statues fell, the institutions of our country showed their true colors. They joined the mob and pulled down what the rabble missed. Jacobins in the street joined Jacobins in government agencies and air-conditioned boardrooms. The pride flag and the BLM flag replaced the American flag as the symbols of the new regime.

As Jeremy Carl wrote at The American Conservative, “the transgressive has become not just mainstream, but the establishment itself.”

So, for those who didn’t join the revolution, who may be dazed by, and disbelieving of, the transformation that’s taken place, we must acknowledge that our cause is currently one of dissenters. It’s the people versus the institutions, and many people now side with the institutions.

But if the Left can transform America from the inside out through a long march, so can the rest of us. It begins with informing ourselves and our children. It gets serious when we organize and use real political power to shape and change the institutions that have become corrupted.

When we look to Florida, we see a model of how to fight back and how to hit the radical left where it hurts the most. From going after woke indoctrination in K-12 schools to reintroducing instruction in American principles in those schools to changing school boards to getting DEI out of colleges and changing their boards of trustees, these are the kinds of institutional changes other Republican governors and other political leaders need to emulate.

The woke think they have the right to be the gatekeepers of all debate, speech, and pedagogy in this country. Let’s show them otherwise.

Mobs and unelected bureaucrats don’t have a right to rule; you do. If we go on the offensive, we will likely find that there is a whole lot more common sense in this country, even at this late hour, than one would think, given the slide of the past several decades.

To win this battle, to restore pride in country, and prevent the United States from slipping into a dark age of decline and possible dissolution, we must make a sustained effort to retake institutions now.

We must do this while there are still Americans left who know what it was like to live in freedom and who wish to hand that down to posterity.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

The Climate Money Monster Cabal may be starting to unravel… Vanguard flees GFANZ thumbnail

The Climate Money Monster Cabal may be starting to unravel… Vanguard flees GFANZ

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By Joanne Nova

Only a week after Ron de Santis pulled $2 billion in Florida funds from BlackRock, Vanguard, the second biggest asset manager in the world, has abruptly pulled out of GFANZ.

Vanguard has $7 trillion in assets under management, and GFANZ is a conglomerate cabal of bankers insurers and asset managers that has snowballed into a 550 member cabal with a jawdropping, obscene, 150 trillion in assets. Together, for a moment, they almost created the illusion of a One World Government by Bankers. After all, the GDP of the United States of America is only $23 trillion. So when an organization with six times the pulling power tells the world to go Net Zero, which company, which government would say “No”? Well, Ron de Santis did — and 18 other US states are working on it too.

The key weakness to the $150,000 billion dollar GFANZ monster is — as I said last week — that it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients, and the good guys […]

Good News: The best hope of unwinding the unholy alliance between Big-Money and Big-Government comes from the US States and they are starting to sink their teeth in.

BlackRock is the defacto Global Climate Police — but disguised as a monster investment fund. The way to break it is to expose that its primary interest is not in making money for its clients but as a Woke political tool.

BlackRock are able to intimidate most of the world with $10 trillion dollars in assets. They are effectively the third biggest “country” in the world by GDP. But it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients. And once those clients figure it out and pull their funds, BlackRock will become an empty shell. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company…

It’s a scam where BlackRock target legal corporations in states that voted to use fossil fuels to effectively undo what the voters wanted. A few months ago, 19 States in the USA started asking BlackRock and the US SEC some hot and hard legal questions. West Virginia announced they would boycott firms that boycott fossil fuels, and […]

*****
This article was published by CFACT and is reproduced with permission.

An Intellectual Feast for Contrarians thumbnail

An Intellectual Feast for Contrarians

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By Craig J. Cantoni

A new book questions the conventional wisdom about immigration, diversity, assimilation, and the causes of prosperity.

Caution!  Don’t be seen reading the following book in public.

The Culture Transplant:  How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot like the Ones They Left, by Garett Jones, 2023, Stanford Business Books, 213 pages.

There is not a whiff of racism, nativism, jingoism, or supremacism in the book.  Nor does it downplay the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, colonialism, and imperialism.  But its conclusions are so counter to today’s zeitgeist on immigration, diversity, assimilation, and the causes of prosperity that you’ll risk being canceled if you’re seen reading it.

The book is not a polemic.  Written by an associate professor of economics, It is a distillation of many scholarly studies—studies that I had never heard of, although I had smugly thought I was well-versed in the topics, especially the topic of diversity, given that I had been at the leading edge of the diversity movement going back to when the movement was started in 1990 by R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., as a result of his landmark Harvard Business Review article, “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity.”

Many of the studies cited in the book came out of academia.  Somehow, they got past campus censors, even though the study findings had to hurt someone’s feelings.

Speaking of feelings, some of my fellow Italians might get their Roman noses out of joint.  The book speaks negatively about Italian anarchists and socialists who had immigrated to Argentina, circa 1900.  They joined with like-minded emigrants from Spain in changing the politics and culture of the nation, so that Argentina went from being one of the richest countries in the world to a middling one beset by political strife and a statist government.

The core premise of the book is that “immigration, to a large degree, creates a culture transplant, making the place that migrants go a lot like the places they left.  And for good and for ill, those culture transplants shape a nation’s future prosperity.”  (The same shaping can happen in states, cities, and neighborhoods.)

The shaping can be negative when migrants come from places with low social trust, with centuries of little technological innovation, and with governments that are too corrupt and confiscatory, or too weak to provide basic services and protect rights and property.  It can take many generations for the descendants of these migrants, as a group, on average, to sever the cultural chains and assimilate and prosper in their new country.

Examples abound in the book.  So do statistics, charts, and graphs.  And so do caveats.  The author cites exceptions to the rule, admits when it’s difficult to distinguish between causation and correlation, and quotes studies that disagree with his conclusions.  Still, in spite of the headache-inducing amount of data, it became clear to this reader that the conclusions are on a sound intellectual footing.

Some of the conclusions match the conclusions of a book on my bookshelf, the New York Times bestseller, Why Nations Fail:  The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.  Its take on the socioeconomic problems in Latin America is of special interest to me, given that I live close to the southern border in Tucson and had lived for five years in the barrio of San Antonio. The take is that the Spanish Empire’s confiscatory economic system, two-class social system, and closed political system left a legacy in its former colonies of corruption, poverty, social distrust, inexperience with pluralism, and a paucity of technological innovation.

According to The Culture Transplant, people whose ancestors emigrated from China and Western Europe, excluding those from the Spanish Empire, had an edge in achieving prosperity, due to both regions having long histories of governmental and technical innovations. Some might counter that the edge came from colonialism and imperialism, but it’s difficult to make that case with respect to China.

The author of the book clearly favors the cultural traits that Chinese migrants brought to other countries in Southeast Asia, and more recently in history, to America.  Succeeding generations have done exceedingly well, even where they’ve been in the minority and faced discrimination—and in spite of China’s horrible experiment with communism.  Aided by Confucian values, the traits include a high savings rate, a high degree of social trust, high industriousness, a strong emphasis on education and family, and a natural propensity for trade.  The author goes so far as to say that a surefire way of raising a nation out of poverty would be the admission of a large number of Chinese immigrants.

If that’s not controversial enough, let’s now enter the minefield of diversity.

The author makes a distinction between skill diversity and ethnic diversity.  Clearly, having a diversity of skills, especially higher skills, is a positive for nations and industry. Just as clearly, skill diversity is often the result of ethnic diversity.  It’s far less clear, however, that ethnic diversity is always positive, or to quote today’s cliché, “a strength.” That’s because there are many examples in history and around the world of ethnic diversity leading to mistrust, strife, divisiveness, and identity politics.

When Roosevelt Thomas started the diversity movement, his contention was that companies would be able to better relate to their customers and sell more stuff if their workforce mirrored the racial diversity of the nation.  He also contended that as the nation’s workforce became less white, companies would be able to relate better to employees if the staff at all levels mirrored the national workforce.

There is a lot of truth in the first contention about selling more stuff, but there’s also some hyperbole.  The fact is that nearly homogenous Germany has little difficulty in selling cars in America, and almost totally homogenous Japan and S. Korea have little difficulty in selling cars and electronics in America.

Regarding the second contention, a lot depends on how a diverse staff is achieved.  If accomplished through ham-handed reverse discrimination and the negative stereotyping of white employees in so-called racial sensitivity seminars, diversity initiatives are counterproductive and even harmful.

Then there is a practical issue.  Given that there are over one hundred unique ethnocultural groups in the US, it’s virtually impossible to achieve proportional representation of all of them at all levels throughout a company.

What about profitability?  Don’t some studies show that diversity leads to greater profits?  Yes they do, but the studies tend to be done of companies that are big, deep-pocketed, and already profitable. It’s not possible to determine if diversity in such companies is the result of profitability or the cause of profitability.

No doubt, few Americans are familiar with a landmark study of workplace diversity published in 1998 by Kathryn Williams of Columbia University and Charles O’Reilly of Stanford.  They concluded that:

The preponderance of the empirical evidence suggests that diversity is most likely to impede group functioning.  Unless steps are taken to actively counteract these effects, the evidence suggests that, by itself, diversity is more likely to have negative than positive effects on group performance.

I’m not suggesting here that diversity is not a worthwhile endeavor.  After all, I was at the leading edge of the diversity movement.  But if pursued stupidly, diversity is not a strength.

Given that the US is a multiethnic country, it’s important to get it right and not be stupid about it.  To quote Barack Obama:

America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy.  And we don’t know yet if that can hold.  There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough to say for certain that it’s going to work.

Anyway, in closing, a few words of advice:  Be careful in accepting my opinion of The Culture Transplant.  As a lifelong contrarian, I have a strong bias in favor of books that question conventional wisdom.

Gates Foundation CEO Demands Social Credit Score for ‘Low- and Middle-Income’ Countries thumbnail

Gates Foundation CEO Demands Social Credit Score for ‘Low- and Middle-Income’ Countries

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By Catherine Salgado

Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman insisted that there has to be “digital infrastructure” in “low- and middle-income” countries. What does that mean? A social credit score for African, Asian, and South American countries, of course. Nothing like digital imperialism.

This is what Suzman said, in a Dec. 1 press release:

“How we think about infrastructure for development is changing. Beyond roads and bridges, we also need digital public infrastructure (DPI) that can support a range of applications, from mobile banking and social welfare to disease surveillance.”

“Mobile banking” means your financial transactions are tied to your digital profile and thus what the government and tech companies want you to say and buy. Same for social welfare.

Also, Bill Gates was accused of genocide in an international court for pushing the deadly Covid vaccines and has a history of being tied to vaccine scandals in Africa and Asia, so I really don’t think we can trust his foundation on disease surveillance.

“[Suzman:] DPI, which is often based on open-source software, has significant potential for accelerating improvements in health and economic welfare. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic—countries with digital infrastructure were able to quickly send stimulus payments to their most vulnerable populations.

But how do we as funders support public and private partnerships that build DPI in a cohesive, scalable way? Germany is among the countries taking the lead in answering this question through its newly launched digital development strategy.”

Germany, which is currently in economic crisis. I don’t think they’re a stellar example of success in anything at the moment.

“At our foundation, we believe that DPI can help countries unlock new opportunities, particularly for women. Today, we are announcing a US$20 million grant to Co-Develop, a new multi-donor fund that will support DPI efforts in low- and middle-income countries.

Multi-donor funds such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have helped bring about transformative advances in global health; with Co-Develop, we can do the same for digital infrastructure. This will help us have a massive impact on the economic mobility of women in low-income countries.”

The press release didn’t explain exactly how increased surveillance and online social credit scores help women, of course. Just trust Suzman and Gates.

I guess Suzman is on the same page as the United Nations, which recently released a report on how Nigerians need to have fewer children. The UN pushed abortion and contraception for Asia and Africa, and the Gates Foundation wants to push digital surveillance on low- and middle-income countries. Neither has any right to do so.

The Gates Foundation, under the leadership of Bill Gates and Suzman, is trying to spread Marxist tyranny around the world.

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

House Republicans Call for Ban on Big Tech Private Funding of Election Administration thumbnail

House Republicans Call for Ban on Big Tech Private Funding of Election Administration

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By Fred Lucas

Some House Republicans are urging federal action to bar private money from bankrolling election administration after a Big Tech-aligned group that made controversial grants in 2020 is issuing another round of grants aimed at the 2024 elections.

“Private money has no place in public election infrastructure,” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told The Daily Signal in a statement.

The Daily Signal first reported last week that the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, has given out $500,000 grants to at least two election jurisdictions—Greenwich, Connecticut, and Macoupin County, Illinois. On Friday, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that the city of Madison received $1.5 million from the group.

These grants come after 24 states enacted bans on the use of private funds for local government election administration.

“I’m grateful that nearly half of all states have banned these shady practices, but most Democrat-controlled states will never prevent their Big Tech partners from influencing their elections,” Banks continued. “A Republican House majority needs to step up and pass national legislation to prevent private actors from funding election organizations.”

Mostly red states enacted the bans, but so did some that voted for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

In 2021, while in the House minority, Banks joined 11 other Republicans in co-sponsoring legislation to amend the Internal Revenue Code to prohibit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations from providing direct funding to official election administrations.

In 2020, the Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed $350 million in grants to various local election offices, funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg reportedly spent a total of $419 million on the election, giving the remaining amount to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which also gave to local election offices.

In April, the Center for Tech and Civic Life launched the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence in partnership with several other nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, which is a project of the New Venture Fund backed financially by Arabella Advisors. Arabella has established and funded numerous groups on the Left.

“In the 2020 election, the [Center for Tech and Civic Life] spent millions of dollars funneling money into Democrat election precincts to fund voter-registration drives, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and other grassroots efforts that helped Democrat politicians,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., told The Daily Signal in a statement.

“You want to know why many people across the country have serious questions about the integrity of our elections?” added Boebert, who also co-sponsored the End Zuckerbucks Act in 2021. “It starts with shady stuff like this, where left-wing Democrat organizations launder money to local government election agencies to influence election results. Private money should be removed from our election administration system.”

According to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, the grants aimed to help election officials deal with COVID-19 concerns in the 2020 election. Yet, local officials used very little of the money to buy personal protective equipment, instead spending funds on getting out the vote and opening new polling places. A whopping 92% of the funds went to Democrat-leaning precincts, according to an analysis by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a watchdog group.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment before publication.

The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence selected 10 jurisdictions to be part of its program for grants and training. They include jurisdictions in battleground states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, and Nevada. But jurisdictions also included clearly blue states, such as two counties in California, two counties in Illinois, and one Connecticut city.

The largest funder of the alliance’s five-year, $80 million initiative is the Audacious Project, which is financed largely by those connected with the Big Tech sector, including Microsoft and Amazon, and is described by Inside Philanthropy as “a tech-heavy group of funders that lean liberal in their grantmaking.”

The Daily Signal made public records requests in the 10 jurisdictions and to date found that Greenwich, Connecticut, and Macoupin County, Illinois, each got $500,000 grants. These were divided into $150,000 given in December and $350,000 to be awarded in December 2023, ahead of the 2024 presidential election year.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Untold Stories: Native American Indian Soldiers Who Shaped America’s History

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By Catherine Salgado

There are so many inspiring, beautiful stories about the great heroes of American history which are scarcely ever told. One happens on them accidentally—buried in a thick, out-of-print biography, in small print on a museum sign, casually and fleetingly mentioned in an obscure educational video. America cannot return to greatness in the future if we do not truly understand the greatness of our past. That is why I am writing an article series to tell a few of these little-known but moving or illustrative “untold stories” of American greatness.

Previous articles in this series have included the “Battle of Princeton” painting by America’s first deaf artist, William Mercer; how George Washington saved a slave family from being divided; how a former slave became ‘Aunt Jemima,’ the first living trademark; Fr. Capodanno, the “Grunt Padre” and Marine hero; the first Native American Indian university graduate, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck; and Abraham Lincoln’s moving meeting with freed slaves in Richmond, VA. Today’s article is a collection of stories highlighting a few of the brave Native American Indian soldiers of the US Army and Marines who helped shape American history.

First is Sgt. William Alchesay (1853-1928), a U.S. Indian Scout during the Indian Wars:

“‘The Indian scouts have done most valuable service.’ -Report of Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele
William Alchesay, a White Mountain Apache, joined the Indian Scouts in 1872. He worked closely with Maj. Gen. George Crook, who preferred to use American Indian scouts along with his regular cavalry. Alchesay’s dedication and bravery was noted and he was cited for his ‘Gallant conduct during campaigns and engagements with Apaches.’ After his service, he became an advocate for his people, traveling to Washington, D.C., to meet President Grover Cleveland and President Theodore Roosevelt.”

Kayitah (1856-1934) was another U.S. Indian Scout during the Indian Wars:

“‘It does seem that a real injustice was done to these two old scouts.’ -O.M. Burgess, Bureau of Indian Affairs
Serving with the 6th Cavalry in 1886, Kayitah and another Indian Scout, Martine, delivered a critical message demanding surrender of Apache Chief Geronimo, who had fled to Mexico. Following the successful mission, both scouts were wrongly imprisoned for a year after being mistaken for hostile forces.”

But Kayitah would not allow this racist injustice to ruin his loyalty to the US Army.

“Kayitah stayed in the Army until being honorably discharged in 1914. In 1925, with assistance from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kayitah received an increase in his pension after it was discovered that he wasn’t properly compensated for his service.”

Pvt. Richard Oskison (1878-1953) was a member of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “Rough Riders” during the Spanish-American War:

“‘All. . .possessed in common the traits of hardihood and a thirst for adventure.’ -Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt
Oskison, a member of the Cherokee nation, mustered into the Army in May 1898. Less than two months later, he was fighting with Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Rough Riders’ in Cuba. The unit, comprised primarily of men from the western territories, was made famous in newspapers and became a symbol of American heroism. Oskison was injured on 1 July 1898 at the decisive Battle of San Juan Hill, the bloodiest battle of the war. After leaving the Army, Oskison stayed active in veteran groups until his death.”

Native American Indian “Code talkers” have been key in US military intelligence operations for over a hundred years. During World War I, the Choctaw language was used to transmit secret tactical messages, ultimately helping launch a successful surprise attack against the Germans. During World War II, Navajo recruits developed a practically unbreakable code and went down in history as the famed Navajo Code Talkers.

“[CIA.gov] The first 29 recruited Navajos (one dropped out) arrived at Camp Elliott near San Diego in May 1942. One of the first tasks for these recruits was to develop a Navajo code.

The Navajo language seemed to be the perfect option as a code because it is not written and very few people who aren’t of Navajo origin can speak it.

However, the Marine Corps took the code to the next level and made it virtually unbreakable by further encoding the language with word substitution.

During the course of the war, about 400 Navajos participated in the code talker program. . .A skeptical lieutenant decided to test their skills and the code before trusting them to deliver actual combat messages.

The Code Talkers successfully translated, transmitted and re-translated a test message in two and a half minutes. Without using the Navajo code, it could take hours for a soldier to complete the same task.

From then on, the Code Talkers were used in every major operation involving the Marines in the Pacific theater. Their primary job was to transmit tactical information over telephone and radio.

During the invasion of Iwo Jima, six Navajo Code Talkers were operating continuously. They sent more than 800 messages. All of the messages were transmitted without error.

The Navajo Code Talkers were treated with the utmost respect by their fellow marines. Major Howard Connor, who was the signal officer of the Navajos at Iwo Jima, said, ‘Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.’”

Speaking of Iwo Jima, the Navajo Code Talkers weren’t the only Native American Indian soldiers who made history there. We all know the famous image of the Marines raising the American flag on the blood-soaked soil of Iwo Jima, but few people know who the Marines in that photo were.

Ira Hayes, Kayitah, Richard Oskison, William Alchesay, and the Choctaw and Navajo Code Talkers are only a few of the many Native American Indian soldiers whose stories may be little known, but the effects of whose heroism are still being enjoyed by Americans today.

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

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The New, New Antisemitism

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By Victor Davis Hanson

The old antisemitism was more a right-wing than a left-wing phenomenon—perhaps best personified by the now-withered Ku Klux Klan.

A new antisemitism followed from the campus leftism of the 1960s. It arose from and was masked by a general hatred of Israel, following the Jewish state’s incredible victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.

That lopsided triumph globally transformed Israel in the leftist mind from a David fighting the Arab Goliath into a veritable Western imperialist, neocolonialist overdog.

On campuses, Middle East activism, course instruction, and faculty profiles are now virulently anti-Israel—and indistinguishable from anti-Jewishness.

When columnist Ben Shapiro spoke at Stanford University in 2019, left-wing posters were plastered around campus depicting Shapiro as an insect menace. A “BenBGon” bug-spray bottle in Nazi fashion unsubtly suggested that a chemical agent is the best remedy to make sure Jews “be gone” from the premises.

The avowed socialist Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., retweeted the old propaganda boast, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Tlaib knew well that “to the sea” only could mean the extinction of Israel itself and its 9 million Jews. She deleted her tweet, but only after an outcry of protest.

Anti-Zionists and leftist Palestinian activists Linda Sarsour and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.—“it’s all about the Benjamins”—often made no effort to hide their antisemitism.

Yet now a dangerous new, new antisemitism is trending, predominantly among African Americans—especially prominent politicians, celebrities, and billionaires.

The old trope that blacks inordinately were prejudiced against Jews due to past inner-city stereotypes of exploiting Jewish landlords has been recalibrated. It is now repackaged by black elites claiming that their careers are overly profitable to, and orchestrated by, “the Jews.”

It has been difficult to find any major black leader who has not trafficked in antisemitism, whether Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“tell them to pin their yarmulkes back”), Louis Farrakhan (“gutter religion”), or Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright (“Them Jews”).

Yet what is different about the new, new antisemitism is the open defiance, often even or especially when exposed.

Kayne West was met with pushback after warning on Twitter, “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Yet he trumped that soon by praising Adolf Hitler.

The Black Hebrew movement absurdly claims blacks are the real biblical Jews, and Jews the imposters. Black Lives Matter clumsily disguised its antisemitism when claiming Israelis were committing mass genocide in the Middle East.

When novelist Alice Walker was chastised for praising virulent antisemite David Icke (he claimed that Jews formed a cabal of “lizard people”), she too was unremorseful. Walker retorted that Icke was “brave” for publishing his nutty rants.

Rappers from Public Enemy and Ice Cube to Jay-Z and Kanye West all spouted anti-Jewish venom. And billionaires from the late Michael Jackson to LeBron James have dabbled in antisemitic talk—the first in lines from lyrics, the second in retweets.

In the hate-crime statistics, blacks as perpetrators are overrepresented, and, as victims, Jews and Asians are overrepresented. “Knock out the Jew” occasionally resurfaces as a common sport among New York City’s black youth.

In our “woke” age, race is seen as an indemnity policy for any self-described victim. Thus even elite blacks, as the still oppressed, cannot be seen as oppressors against “white” Jews.

Wokeism’s competitive victimization often embraces Holocaust denial. That way the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews in industrial fashion does not overshadow the need for a reparatory legacy to atone for slavery and Jim Crow.

When Whoopi Goldberg claimed the Holocaust was not about race and was, for a while, suspended from her morning chat show, she apologized only temporarily. Goldberg this week returned to claiming that the Holocaust was only a crime by white people against white people.

In her ignorance, she was oblivious that Hitler and the Nazis did not believe Jews to be fully human at all.

Among black elites in professional sports and entertainment, the belief that Jews inordinately are represented as agents, executives, or commissioners is considered proof of exploitation—and often ridiculously reduced to master-slave psychodramas.

Marquee professional athletes like Kyrie Irving, DeShawn Jackson, and the retired Stephen Jackson only reluctantly backed off their blatant anti-Jewish messaging.

Apparently, if the athletes of the NFL and NBA are approximately 60% or more African American, then they are merely diverse. But if Jews in the entertainment and sport hierarchies appear more frequently than their 2.4% demographic, then as a “cabal” they supposedly pose a threat to black livelihoods.

Black antisemitism is spreading in strange, dangerous ways.

Why? Woke orthodoxy offers cover by insisting that supposed victims never van be victimizers. A leftist-dominated media hides or contextualizes the hatreds promulgated by its own constituents.

Jewish-American groups remain predominantly liberal. And too often, they conveniently overlook black antisemitism, given the demands of left-wing intersectional solidarity.

So, expect the new, new antisemitism to grow more common—and more toxic.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Universities Are Seeing An Enormous Spike In Antisemitism. Here’s Why thumbnail

Universities Are Seeing An Enormous Spike In Antisemitism. Here’s Why

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By Kate Anderson

College campuses saw a significant spike in antisemitism over the past year as universities continue to miss the mark when it comes to protecting Jewish students from antisemitism, according to several Jewish experts and advocates.

In the 2021-2022 school year, threats to Jewish identity on college campuses doubled from 114 incidents the year before to 228 incidents, while incidents of suppression of Jewish identity almost tripled from 37 to 123, according to a report from the AMCHA Initiative, a pro-Israel college campus organization. Experts and organizations that work extensively with Jewish college students told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the attempts to remove Israel from Jewish identity on college campuses is at the root of the spike.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA, told the DCNF that she had been tracking antisemitism on campus for over two decades, but that the last few years had been “unprecedented.”

“What we found, and what was really frightening to us [when thinking] about what this means in the future, there is a real attack on those Jewish students who support Israel and who feel that is a very important part of their identity,” she noted.

Thom Waye, Chief Strategy Officer of Chabad on Campus International (CCI), told the DCNF that the antisemitism of the past year is not new but that social media created a “hockey stick effect” that pushed the issue on campus to the forefront. Ori Raphael, a Texas-based civil rights attorney and the executive director of the Jewish Justice Foundation, expressed similar thoughts.

“Antisemitism [is] a disease, and college campuses are just the modern-day breeding ground,” Raphael stated.

Rossman-Benjamin and Raphael argued that university administrations have left learning behind and substituted it for indoctrination, with antisemitism being the go-to form since Jews, according to Raphael, are an “easy target.” Rossman-Benjamin explained that university faculty and administrations have continued to push a “redefinition” of the relationship between Israel and Judaism that leads to discrimination and hatred towards Jewish students.

In May of 2021, Hamas and Israel were involved in a conflict that left almost 300 dead, according to Brandeis University. The conflict “opened the floodgates” for faculty and administrations to push anti-Zionist and often blatant antisemitic rhetoric on campus, according to Rossman-Benjamin.

“We saw 160 departments on over 120 schools across the country actually issue a statement ‘we put our full support behind the Palestinians and Israel is an apartheid state,’” she explained. “Many of the statements supported an academic boycott of Israel.”

Waye disagreed on where to point the blame for the rising hate and emphasized his belief that universities have the best intentions for their students, but lack education on the issue.

“I really believe this comes down to education and engagement … engagement and education of administrations, [and] where feasible, to faculty,” Waye said. “Chabad is really focused on trying to live your life through the lens of positivity, so our overall approach to antisemitism is to enable Jewish pride and enable students to understand their history enough that when they are on campus they embrace their right to self-identification and self-determination.”

AMCHA released a report earlier this month detailing how university policies fail to protect Jewish students. The report found that Jewish students were at an increased risk of abuse because they did not belong to a “protected minority” group.

“More than one-third (35) of the schools included in their codes of conduct statements affirming that the harassment of students in protected identity groups would receive more severe punitive sanctions than similar behavior directed against ‘unprotected’ students,” the report stated. “There were no schools where ‘unprotected’ students were guaranteed administrative consideration of and response to harassing behavior equivalent to that guaranteed to ‘protected’ students.”

AMCHA’s report showed that less that 40% of schools define harassment “as conduct that limited, interfered with, or impaired a student’s ability to participate in campus life.” Over the past year, many schools have come under scrutiny for issues similar to the ones addressed in the report.

At Harvard University, a pro-Palestine student group was allowed to host “Israel Apartheid Week” during the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Additionally, the University of California Berkeley Law School is currently under investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after multiple student groups passed bylaws prohibiting pro-Israel speakers from their chapters.

Two Jewish students at the State University of New York at New Paltz, both sexual assault survivors, were kicked out of a campus survivor group after other members found out the Jewish students supported Israel, according to Campus Reform. The City University of New York assigned a former civil rights director for the Hamas-linked Council for American Islamic Relations to investigate allegations of antisemitism made by a Jewish professor, and George Washington University conducted an investigation earlier this month after a pro-Palestine group allegedly harassed Jewish students and events on campus.

Rossman-Benjamin, Waye and Raphael agreed that over the last year, the intense pressure on Jewish students has taken a heavy toll.

“It has definitely been more difficult for students,” Waye said. “The most insidious aspect of antisemitism on a college campus is when a student is compelled to hide their identity because if you do that then the opportunity to really celebrate your history, celebrate your roots and your religion becomes very negatively impacted.”

StopAntisemitism (SA), a nonpartisan organization dedicated to exposing hatred against Jews, released its annual college report for 2022 and found that 72% of students felt the administration did not take concerns about antisemitism seriously while 73% admitted to hiding their Jewish identity on campus out of fear for their safety.

Raphael told the DCNF that he “has hope” for 2023 because “most people are good” but warned that too often good people wait until a problem reaches a point of no return before doing anything. Rossman-Benjamin expressed that universities have a long way to go before antisemitism will start to decrease on campus.

“Without a sort of game-changing intervention I don’t think that we will find success in shifting this trajectory of increasing antisemitism, and that’s very frightening,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “Ultimately this is only going to happen if we get out of this identity trap where we only address things if they are directed at students who are considered a part of a protected identity group.”

Harvard, GWU, U.C. Berkely, SUNY New Paltz and CUNY did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

World Economic Forum Pushes AI, Climate Activism, Metaverse thumbnail

World Economic Forum Pushes AI, Climate Activism, Metaverse

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By Catherine Salgado

The World Economic Forum is an insidious organization, that openly avowed its plan for a world where you “own nothing, have no privacy” and enjoy it. WEF head Klaus Schwab also previously boasted that Russian President and former KGB thug Vladimir Putin was a WEF alumnus. Not to mention a WEF guru was caught saying he wants “less souls” on the planet.

Would you like to know what WEF considers its top priority areas right now? According to the WEF website, they are: Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Cybersecurity, Education, Skills and Learning, The Metaverse, and Workforce and Employment.

There are several categories here that are particularly concerning: The Metaverse, Artificial Intelligence, and Climate Change.

Why? Well, regarding the metaverse, WEF wants you to “own nothing, have no privacy” and enjoy it, as I said above. What better way to deprive you slowly of real belongings while giving you imaginary benefits than the metaverse? There are already plans for the metaverse tech to be used constantly in your life, not just for entertainment—shopping, traveling, everything on different “reality channels.”

As for artificial intelligence (AI), it has many concerning uses, including—in the present or the dystopian future—monitoring babies being grown in fake wombs in a lab, running the robots used to replace human workers (remember the WEF guru said he wanted “less souls” on the planet), and as basis for uploaded “digital identities” supposedly to allow people to live forever. As WEF itself described the future, “Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing.” WEF head Klaus Schwab imagined a merging of the biological and digital in humans, and AI is just part of that transhumanist process.

Then there’s climate change, which is used by both WEF and the United Nations as an excuse to achieve the world where you own nothing (see the UN 2030 Agenda). WEF once whined that the Russian invasion of Ukraine—which has left as many as 40,000 Ukrainian civilians dead or wounded—was distracting from climate change, though it also hoped the bloody conflict could spur climate action. But WEF elites will continue to fly their private jets around and live in their mansions regardless of supposed climate emergencies. “Climate change” is just an unscientific way of creating the dystopia for which WEF longs.

*****

This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

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