Weekend Read: Imprimis – Inside the Transgender Empire thumbnail

Weekend Read: Imprimis – Inside the Transgender Empire

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By Christopher F. Rufo

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story goes deeper than most Americans know.

In the late 1980s, a group of academics, including Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker, established the disciplines of “queer theory” and “transgender studies.” These academics believed gender to be a “social construct” used to oppress racial and sexual minorities, and they denounced the traditional categories of man and woman as a false binary that was conceived to support the system of “heteronormativity”—i.e., the white, male, heterosexual power structure. This system, they argued, had to be ruthlessly deconstructed. And the best way to achieve this, they argued further, was to promote transgenderism. If men can become women, and women men, they believed, the natural structure of Creation could be toppled.

Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transgender professor currently at the University of Arizona, revealed the general thrust and tone of transgender ideology in his Kessler Award Lecture at the City University of New York in 2008, describing his work as “a secular sermon that unabashedly advocates embracing a disruptive and refigurative genderqueer or transgender power as a spiritual resource for social and environmental transformation.” In Stryker’s best-known essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” he contends that the “transsexual body” is a “technological construction” that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker writes. And this monster, he continues, is destined to channel its “rage and revenge” against the “naturalized heterosexual order”; against “‘traditional family values’”; and against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself.

It is clear from this and from other transgender scholarship that the transgender movement is inherently political. Its reconstruction of personal identity is meant to advance a collective political reconstruction or transformation. Some trans activists even view their movement as the future of Marxism. In a collection of essays titled Transgender Marxism, activist writer Rosa Lee argues that trans people can serve as the new vanguard of the proletariat, promising to abolish heteronormativity in the same way that orthodox Marxism promised to abolish capitalism.

“In a different era,” Lee writes,

Marxists spoke of the construction of a “new socialist man” as a crucial task in the broader process of socialist construction. Today, in a time of both rising fascism and an emergent socialist movement, our challenge is transsexualising our Marxism. We should think [of] the project of transition to communism in our time—communisation—as including the transition to new communist selves, new ways of being and relating to one another.

This is the great project of the transgender movement: to abolish the distinctions of man and woman, to transcend the limitations established by God and nature, and to connect the personal struggle of trans individuals to the political struggle to transform society in a radical way.

From the Fringes to the Center

The trans movement was hatched, then, on the fringes of American academia. But how did it move so quickly to the center of American public life? Like many other things, it began with a flood of cash, as some of the wealthiest people in the country began devoting enormous sums of money to promote transgenderism.

One of these people is Jennifer Pritzker, who was born James Pritzker in 1950. After serving several years in the U.S. Army, Pritzker went into business, having inherited a sizable part of the Hyatt hotel fortune. In 2013, he announced a male-to-female gender transition and was celebrated in the press as the “first trans billionaire.” Almost immediately, he began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals, and activist organizations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.

This money was allied with political power, as Pritzker’s cousin, Illinois Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker, signed legislation in 2019, his first year in office, to inject gender theory into the state education curriculum and to direct state Medicaid funds toward transgender surgeries. Speaking before an audience of trans activists, he proclaimed:

[O]ur state government is firmly on your side, on the side of every gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer person in the state of Illinois. . . . Those of you in this room know better than anyone that marriage equality was never the endgame. . . . We’re gonna make sure that all transgender Illinoisans are ensured their basic human rights and that healthcare services are provided to them so that they can thrive.

Here’s an example of how this combination of well-funded activism and political influence works in practice: Pritzker-funded activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital (the largest children’s hospital in Chicago) provide local schools with training, materials, and personnel who promote gender transitions for children, using the hospital’s reputation to give their ideology a scientific veneer. And the more one investigates, the worse it gets. Children are exposed, for instance, not only to trans ideology, but to concepts such as “kink” (unusual tastes in sexual behavior), “BDSM” (bondage, domination, submission, and masochism), binders to flatten breasts, and prosthetic penises.

Lurie Children’s Hospital, through its outreach presentations in Chicago public schools, encourages teachers and school administrators to support “gender diversity” in their districts, automatically “affirm” students who announce sexual transitions, and “communicate a non-binary understanding of gender” to children in the classroom. The objective, as one version of the presentation suggests, is to disrupt the “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” and facilitate the transition to a more “gender creative” world. School districts are encouraged to designate “Gender Support Coordinators” to help facilitate children’s sexual and gender transitions, which, under the recommended “confidentiality” policy, can be kept secret from parents and families.

In effect, this results in a sophisticated school-to-gender-clinic pipeline. Teachers, counselors, doctors, and activists on social media and elsewhere—many of whom are employed or subsidized by members of the Pritzker family—push children in the direction of what Chicago-area “detransitioner” Helena Kerschner, recalling her own experience, calls “the trans identity rabbit hole.” And despite frequent claims to the contrary, this is not a temporary or reversible process. Of the children who begin puberty blockers, the medical literature suggests that approximately 95 percent move on to cross-sex hormones, and that 50 percent of the females who begin cross-sex hormone treatments move on to “trans-affirming” surgeries.

The Synthesis of All Oppressions

Another place my investigation of the trans movement has taken me is Highland Park, Michigan, a city of roughly 9,000 residents located about six miles north of downtown Detroit. Highland Park has been plagued by poverty, violence, and crime for decades. Many of its homes and businesses have been abandoned or demolished. It is teetering on the edge of insolvency, yet it is home to one institution that is overflowing with funds: the Ruth Ellis Center, metro Detroit’s central laboratory for the synthesis of transgender science and politics.

The Ruth Ellis Center’s marketing pitch is an amalgam of all the usual euphemisms: “trauma-informed care,” “restorative justice,” “harm reduction,” “racial equity,” and “gender-affirming care.” In the name of these things, the Ellis Center and its partners conduct large-scale medical experiments on a population of predominantly poor black youths.

Dr. Maureen Connolly, a pediatrician at Henry Ford Health, leads the Ellis Center’s medical partnership, providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical referrals to scores of Detroit kids. Here’s how she describes the child sex-change process:

Transitioning is an umbrella term to describe the process that someone goes through to bring their external self more closely into alignment with their gender identity. For some people that might mean changing their gender expression and the clothes that they wear or how they wear their hair. It might mean using a new name and different pronouns. And that’s wonderful. For others, it can involve taking medication to make their body more closely aligned with how they identify in terms of gender—typically, that’s masculinizing or feminizing medications or hormone therapy. People can also choose to pursue gender-affirming surgeries, which are surgical interventions to bring their body more closely in alignment with their gender identity.

Keep in mind, again, that in the context of her role at the Ellis Center, Connolly is not talking here about the affluent, educated, male-to-female trans individuals who serve as the public face of the trans movement. She is mostly talking about kids from the Detroit ghetto who suffer from high rates of family breakdown, substance abuse, mental illness, and self-destructive behavior. As such, one might suppose that they are especially vulnerable to the claim that gender transition will solve all their problems.

“My name is Righteous, first and foremost,” says an Ellis Center patient who now identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns:

I think I might have been about eight years old when I remembered or that I recall having any thought of being transgender or gender non-conforming. . . . It felt like I was an outsider to this whole world of America. On top of not being, you know, a European-American, I was black. . . . Most of my dysphoria comes from people misgendering me. With gender-affirming care, I could get the hormones I needed for free.

Righteous is thus a perfect example of the new synthesis of transgender science and politics. She works as an activist not only for the trans movement, but also for a broader intersectional coalition (i.e., a coalition of oppressed and marginalized groups), including, for instance, the movement to abolish the police. She represents the identity of the oppressed by both nature and nurture and marshals this unique “positionality” to advance the full suite of left-wing social policies. 

Frankenstein Redux

In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote the famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The premise of the book is that modern science, stripped from the constraints of ethics and nature, will end up creating monsters. “Trans-affirming” doctors are the post-modern version of the book’s protagonist, Doctor Frankenstein.

According to survey data, up to 80 percent of trans individuals suffer from serious psychopathologies and one-quarter of black trans youth attempt suicide each year. “Gender-affirming care” largely fails to solve these problems, yet the doctors use these failures to justify even more extreme interventions up to the final one: genital reconstruction.

Dr. Blair Peters is a plastic surgeon (he uses he/they pronouns) who performs trans genital surgeries at the publicly-funded Oregon Health & Science University and whose specialty is creating artificial sex organs. “I think what we’re becoming very known for at OHSU is genital surgery,” he says. “A prime example of that is a procedure called phalloplasty, which is the creation of a penis. And we now have a robotic vaginoplasty program [that] has been a kind of game changer for patient care.”

As I have previously detailed in City Journal, the process for robot-assisted vaginoplasty is gruesome:

According to a handbook published by OHSU, surgeons first cut off the head of the penis and remove the testicles. Then they turn the penile-scrotal skin inside out and, together with abdomen cavity tissue, fashion it into a crude, artificial vagina. “The robotic arms are put through small incisions around your belly button and the side of your belly,” the handbook reads. “They are used to create the space for your vaginal canal between your bladder and your rectum.”

This procedure is plagued with complications. OHSU warns of wound separation, tissue necrosis, graft failure, urine spraying, hematoma, blood clots, vaginal stenosis, rectal injury, fistula, and fecal accidents. Patients must stay in the hospital for a minimum of five days following the procedure, receiving treatment for surgical wounds and having fluid drained through plastic tubes. Once they are home, patients must continue transgender hormone treatments and manually dilate their surgically created “neo-vagina” in perpetuity; otherwise, the tissue will heal, and the cavity will close.

The castration business is booming. According to Peters, the gender clinic at OHSU has “the highest volume on the West Coast”—and with the help of the robot, his team can perform multiple vaginoplasties per day. The phalloplasty program has a 12-to-18-month waiting list for consultations and an additional three-to-six-month waiting list for surgical appointments.

A less common but more symbolically apt surgery performed by Peters and his colleagues is known as “nullification,” in which a smooth, continuous skin covering from the abdomen to the groin is created following a castration or vaginectomy. In other words, the genitalia are replaced by nothing. Nullification surgery is the perfect symbol for the ideology behind the trans movement: the pursuit of the Latin nullum, meaning “nothing”; or the related nihil, the root of the English word “nihilism.” Trans ideology is animated by a profound nihilism that denies human nature and enables barbarism in the name of progress.

***

The future of transgender medicine is in flux. Major American institutions have rallied to its support, with the major medical associations going so far as to call on the federal government to investigate and prosecute its critics. At the same time, some cracks are showing. Detransitioners, a group comprised of mostly young women who have accepted their biological sex after transitioning to various degrees, are going public about the dangers of gender medicine in deeply affecting personal terms. Organizations such as Do No Harm have filed lawsuits and launched advocacy campaigns to curb transgender procedures on minors. And increasing numbers of doctors, who had previously been cowed into silence, are beginning to speak out. State legislators have also taken notice. Earlier this year, I worked with whistleblowers at Texas Children’s Hospital to expose child sex-change procedures that were being conducted in secret. The exposé attracted the attention of Texas lawmakers, who immediately passed the final version of a bill to ban such procedures.

Jennifer Pritzker, Maureen Connolly, Blair Peters, and their ilk occupy the heights of power and prestige, but like Doctor Frankenstein they will not be able to escape the consequences of what they have created. They are condemning legions of children to a lifetime of sorrows and medical necessities, all based on dubious postmodern theories that do not meet the standard of Hippocrates’ injunction in his work Of the Epidemics: “First, do no harm.” Although individuals can be nullified, nature cannot. No matter how advanced trans pharmaceuticals and surgeries become, the biological reality of man and woman cannot be abolished; the natural limitations of God’s Creation cannot be transcended. The attempt to do so will elicit the same heartbreak and alienation captured in the final scene of Mary Shelley’s novel: the hulking monster, shunned by society and betrayed by his father, filled with despair and drifting off into the ice floes—a symbol of the consequence of Promethean hubris.

A doctor at a major children’s hospital had this to say about what puberty blockers do to a child’s mind, body, and soul:

This medication is called a “gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist” and it comes in the form of monthly injections or an implant. And because it simulates the activity of this hormone, it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is this almond-sized structure in your brain, it’s one of the most primal structures we have, and it controls all the other hormonal structures in your body—your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything. . . . And I always think that if someone were to ask me, Where is it that you would look for the divine spark in each individual? I would say that it would be somewhere “beneath the inner chamber,” which is the Greek derivation of the term hypothalamus. To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.

This is why we must fight to put the transgender empire out of business forever.

*****

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a distinguished fellow of Hillsdale College. He is the director of four documentaries for PBS and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything.

Imprimis is a publication of Hillsdale College. It is published 10 times a year. Imprimis and the extensive archive library can be accessed at imprimis.hillsdale.edu. To subscribe for reception by home mailing and/or emailing of Imprimis, click here.

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Judge Commits Fraud to Accuse Trump of Fraud

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By James D. Agresti

In the high stakes New York trial of leading presidential candidate Donald Trump, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in September that Trump defrauded his lenders by inflating the value of his famed Mar-a-Lago estate by “at least 2,300%, compared” to an “appraisal” by the Palm Beach County Tax Assessor.

Several news outlets from left to right challenged that claim because it’s blatantly flawed. CNN, for example, reported:

it’s widely known that the tax assessor valuation is typically, though not always, less than what a property would command on the open market.

This well-known fact is documented by a wide array of real estate industry leaders and business publications, such as Realtor.com, Zillow, and U.S. News & World Report. The last of these explains in bold letters that the:

assessed value of a property is typically lower than appraised market value.

Engoron, an NYU-educated judge with two decades of experience on the bench, isn’t ignorant of the concept of market value and wrote seven pages earlier in the same ruling that:

courts have long found that “generally, it is the ‘market value’ which provides the most reliable valuation for assessment purposes.”

Seemingly oblivious to his own words, Engoron ruled that Trump was liable for fraud in part because “the Palm Beach County Assessor appraised the market value of Mar-a-Lago at between $18 million and $27.6 million,” while Trump valued it “at between $426,529,614 million and $612,110,496, an overvaluation of at least 2,300%, compared to the assessor’s appraisal.”

Highlighting the absurdity of Engoron’s accusation, CNN reported statements from a business scholar and several industry leaders stressing the difference between tax appraisals and market values. Here are just two of the seven statements:

“Appraisal values and market values are just not the same thing. It’s a well-known fact,” said Eli Beracha, chair of the school of real estate at Florida International University. “That’s especially true for properties that are unique. And it’s very easy to argue this is a unique property.”

Dina Goldentayer, executive director of sales at Douglas Elliman in South Florida, said in her experience in the ultra-luxury marketplace the tax assessor’s valuation isn’t considered when trying to value a property. “He wouldn’t make a very good realtor,” Goldentayer said of the judge. “It’s so widely known that it’s not an accurate determination of market value.”

Moreover, the New York Post documented with data from the Palm Beach real estate market that “Mar-a-Lago is worth at least $300 million and that is likely to go up exponentially after dissecting the entire estate.”

PolitiFact Covers For Engoron

Consistent with the facts of this matter, Republican attorney Mike Davis called Engoron’s valuation of Mar-a-Lago “ludicrous” in a video posted to Facebook.

In response, PolitiFact published a “fact check” claiming that Davis’ statement is “false” because Engoron “didn’t value Mar-a-Lago at $18 million. A Palm Beach property appraiser did.”

The glaring flaw of PolitiFact’s claim is that the appraiser didn’t actually assess the market value of Mar-a-Lago, as Engoron alleged. PolitiFact’s article, written by Amy Sherman, obscures this vital fact by removing the phrase “market value” from Engoron’s statement.

Sherman also makes it difficult for her readers to discover what Engoron actually wrote. She does this by linking to the first page of his ruling, while the relevant words are on page 26, and the document is not searchable.

Because Facebook uses PolitiFact as one of its cherry-picked fact checkers, Davis’ post was “flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation.” Facebook then used this flag to reduce the reach of Davis’ post.

The Stakes

New York Attorney General Letitia James—a Democrat who campaigned for this position on a promise to prosecute Trump and remove him from office—brought this case against him. Her press release claims that “Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars,” and thus, she is asking the court to:

  • “remove Trump and his children from their roles at the Trump Organization.”
  • “ban them from future leadership roles in New York.”
  • “force them to “repay $250 million they illegally obtained.”

This isn’t just about Mar-a-Lago. Both James and Engoron, who is also a Democrat, are accusing Trump of inflating the values of many of his assets. This threatens Trump’s entire enterprise.

Engoron has already begun to give James what she asked for. In the same ruling where Engoron misrepresented the market value of Mar-a-Lago, he also ordered that all of the Trump Organization’s New York business certificates be “canceled” and made plans for the businesses to be dissolved.

Per the Associated Press, “Engoron is poised to permanently disrupt the collection of skyscrapers, golf courses and other properties that vaulted Trump to fame and the White House.”

In the ruling, Engoron wrote that NY law gives him the authority to cancel Trump’s business licenses and hold him liable for fraud without any proof that he intentionally inflated the value of his properties. All that is necessary, writes Engoron, is proof that Trump repeatedly conducted business with “false and misleading” financial information.

Under that standard, Engoron himself committed fraud by severely undervaluing Mar-a-Lago. Furthermore, several facts suggest that Engoron did this deliberately. These include Engoron’s own words about the legal importance of market value, the widely known difference between market and appraised value, and Engoron’s decades-long tenure as a judge.

In summary, two powerful New York Democrats are trying to strip the Trump family of their wealth by using a patent falsehood. In conjunction, PolitiFact is providing cover for the judge, and Facebook is using this bogus “fact check” to keep the facts of this matter from the public.

*****

This article was published by Just Facts and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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The True Test of One’s Commitment to Free Speech

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By Rav Arora

Editors Note: We agree that people have a right to say reprehensible and ignorant things. We don’t think the state should do anything to curtail their right to speak. However, private actors such as employers have every right to take their views into consideration when hiring. Those who wish to speak should be free to do so but they must also take responsibility for what they say and face public criticism and private sanction for doing so. The rest of us have every right, and the responsibility, to roundly condemn them. However, the government should stay out of it.

One’s commitment to the foundational, noble ideals of Western, liberal society is most revealingly tested in times of emergency and mortal danger. Core principles such as individualism, bodily autonomy, tolerance, pluralism, and informed consent are easy to support in abstract theory — until such issues carry real societal ramifications and reputational costs.

The past few years have provided no shortage of international uprisings surrounding race relations, viruses, vaccines, elections, and Middle Eastern affairs where peoples’ principle commitments immediately implode in the face of emotionally inflaming injustices (accurately understood or not).

The recent appalling terrorist attack led by Hamas in Israel took more than 1,300 lives while 200 civilians remain hostage. In this time — just as during the early waves of Covid, the killing of George Floyd, and the aftermath of 9/11 — human emotions are highly charged. Even the most sober-minded, objective observers will understandably have a hard time abstaining from descending into reactive outrage in response to horrifying images of child mutilations and Hamas kidnapping women.

Horrific events in the Middle East have now sprung aggressive state measures across the West to clamp down on Hamas-sympathizing public expressions in the name of fighting anti-Semitic vitriol and terrorist activity.

It is precisely at this time that one’s support of free speech and opposition to cancel culture is proven as sincere and principled or politically self-advancing and ultimately fraudulent. Unfortunately, many prominent figures have failed this test.

Several Western countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands have prohibited or threatened state intervention specifically for pro-Palestinian protests.

In the UK, the Home Secretary’s letter to police chiefs urging the crackdown of pro-Palestinian demonstrations which intimidate or target the Jewish community generated serious concerns among free speech advocates, but London’s Deputy Commissioner Dame Lynne Owens clarified that the mere “expression of support for the Palestinian people more broadly, including flying the Palestinian flag, does not, alone, constitute a criminal offence.”

“What we cannot do is interpret support for the Palestinian cause more broadly as automatically being support for Hamas or any other proscribed group,” she stated.

France’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin ordered a ban on all pro-Palestinian protests on the basis that it is “likely to generate public order disturbances.” “The organization of these prohibited demonstrations should lead to arrests,” he stated.

One can’t help but wonder which public demonstrations — pro-life, Black Lives Matter, anti-Covid mandates, NBA championship celebrations etc — are immune from “likely” generating any form of disturbances in the state’s eye.

In response to France’s ban, conservative commentator Dave Rubin (whose show I have appeared on several times) asserted, “Maybe the West has a chance.”

“They’re calling for genocide,” he states in a following tweet responding to a commenter arguing, “Let them protest.” Indeed, a fringe minority of protests around the world have seen its attendants egregiously call for violence. In Sydney, Australia one pro-Palestine rally sparked genocidal chants of “gas the jews.”

Another demonstration in Melbourne reportedly had a group of men stating they were “on the hunt to kill Jews.” As every sensible person can agree, individuals inciting violence against the Jewish community ought to be reprimanded and punished by the state.

But this has been, by far, the exception, not the norm.

Instead, the resounding sentiment across a number of rallies around the world has been a morally confused, misguided, and reprehensible glorification of Palestinian resistance in opposition to Israel. The Hamas terrorist attack is seen as a predictable and proportionate consequence of Israel’s perceived oppression. Journalists Olivia Reingold and Francesca Block carefully document the tenor of pro-Palestinian protests in Midtown Manhattan:

Statements such as “Resistance is justified when people are oppressed!” and “Hamas is a logical conclusion for people struggling and uprising” at this protest capture the dominant ethos of the worldwide demonstrations.

None of this speech is a call to violence. It should be protected and defended with all our ethical convictions — because free speech commitments matter most when our opponents and enemies are attacked.

In Canada, Conservative Senator Leo Housakos sent a letter to Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver’s police departments asserting planned pro-Palestinian rallies “must be stopped.” “This is a matter of public safety,” he goes on. The letter was written in response to The Palestinian Youth Movement’s Facebook posts advertising rallies in the aforementioned Canadian cities:

Link

The posts call on Canadians to “uplift and honour” the Hamas terrorists who carried out the “offensive attack” to murder and kidnap innocent Israeli civilians. As abhorrent as these views may be, they are not calls to violence and law enforcement should never ban such protests (which were peaceful across Canada).

In the United States, free speech concerns surrounding this issue pertain not to protests but blacklists of students who signed onto a Harvard student group letter holding the “Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Vast legions of conservative thinkers and public figures have supported public blacklists of such students, including Megyn Kelly (someone who I personally consider a role model). Substack writer and blogger Max Meyer proceeded to create a “College Terror List” in response to billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman demanding that Harvard release the names of all of the students who signed the letter.

This egregious precedent will surely come back to haunt conservatives who vigorously oppose “cancel culture.” Students who sign letters opposing Black Lives Matter or radical gender ideology may find themselves on a future blacklist, rendering themselves unhireable at progressive-owned companies.

The sophistic conservative defense is that all signatories of the letter are genocidal maniacs. This is most certainly false. The vast majority of students arguably have a grossly incorrect view of history and the geopolitical context of the Hamas massacre, but they are not bloodthirsty barbarians cheering infanticide. To pretend otherwise is incredibly disingenuous.

Megyn Kelly and Dave Rubin have every right not to hire individuals with morally misguided views, but demanding public lists is an extreme step in the wrong direction.

At a bare minimum, one need not be a Middle Eastern expert to recognize the moral depravity of celebrating jihadist “resistance” — rather than explicitly condemning terrorist activity (while sympathizing with the plight of Gazan civilians) — in the immediate aftermath of a heinous bloodbath. It would be similarly inhumane in an American context if protesters gathered by the thousands celebrating Blue Lives Matter (police officers’ heroism) in the day following an unjustifiable act of police brutality.

Even if one is sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians under the rule of a terrorist organization, failing to decry the barbaric actions of Hamas is an appalling moral failure that has been all-too-common across the West over the past week.

And yet at the same time, free speech ought to be defended for views we consider even abhorrent and indefensible. Protests defending Palestinian resistance are legitimate expressions of free speech. Some individuals, such as my friend Kim Iversen, have also expressed rational concerns about Israeli excessive force in response to Hamas’ terror attack.

None of these people — ranging from radical and morally compromised to sensible and humanitarian — should have their free speech rights curtailed.

The West is indeed on the decline if large numbers of individuals in its borders hold values radically at odds with core liberalism — as conservatives correctly note — but criminalizing free speech under the guise of tolerance would undermine the West’s sacred value of free speech, not support it.

Principles matter. Especially in times of emergency.

Many people faced the same dilemma during Covid. Did the purported societal benefit (which quickly proved to be wildly false) of mandating Covid vaccines override people’s foundational rights of informed consent and bodily autonomy?

Governments around the world took the wrong side on this issue, barring its citizens from leaving the country, exercising at a gym, working in federally regulated jobs, and maintaining their livelihoods.

Free speech was also attacked during Covid-19 in the name of preventing needless deaths. Should the tragic lives lost to Covid-19 give the state power to censor “misinformation” online discouraging potentially life-saving vaccinations and promoting deranged conspiracy theories? The Missouri v. Biden case proves the federal government coerced social media companies to censor views that deviated from their public health agenda.

These policies ought to be opposed not (merely) because the state’s version of the scientific facts was wrong time and time again, but because they infringed upon Americans’ First Amendment rights.

Moral emergencies are the times when our principles are most vulnerable to negotiation and even complete collapse due to ideological views and emotionally charged reactions. Unfortunately, many public figures crusading against cancel culture have proven the superiority of their ideological commitments first and foremost as they instantaneously discard their free speech jerseys now that governments around the West support their views and are willing to use their power to crack down on dissidents.

*****

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

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[Davos in the Desert]: An Opportunity To Learn About Hamas Rule in Gaza

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By David Wanetick

On October 7, the world witnessed how Hamas externalizes its demonically deadly proclivities. Over 1,400 senseless and barbaric murders. Babies were decapitated and burned alive. Children were killed in front of their parents. Parents slayed in front of their children. Women raped. Over 200 civilian abductions—babies, children, and the infirm among them. Victims of Hamas’s rampage into Israel hailed from at least 25 countries.

What is less known and little discussed is Hamas’s mercilessly repressive rule of Gaza. Freedom of expression, religion, and the press are more distant than pipe dreams. No semblance of legitimate courts exists in Gaza. Under the thumb of Hamas, Gazan schools teach children only hate. The only thing Hamas glorifies is the death of its own people, under the veneer of martyrdom. Women are stripped of their rights. Gaza’s vast tunnel system was largely built with the small hands of enslaved Gazan children.

Corruption is rampant. Honest Gazan merchants are shaken down to the point of being placed in debtors’ jails. Hamas diverts anything of value—food, fuel, medicine—for its mendacious military purposes. Water pipes are unearthed and repurposed as rocket launchers. Gaza’s schools and hospitals are commandeered by Hamas. Hamas militants use their fellow Gazans as human shields. Hamas terrorists literally tie children to buildings to repel reprisals.

On the evening of December 3, world-renowned Israeli-Arab Bassem Eid will speak about these issues in Chandler, AZ. This is a wonderful opportunity to show your support for Israel, regime change in Gaza, and long-term tranquility in the region by attending this Davos in the Desert program.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

Campus Anti-Semitism Can’t be Stopped Without Dismantling the DEI Complex thumbnail

Campus Anti-Semitism Can’t be Stopped Without Dismantling the DEI Complex

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By Bruce Bialosky

The October 7th murderous terrorist attacks in Israel led to protests erupting on many college campuses. These protests were both verbal and somewhat physical on Israel and the Jewish people while Israel had yet to engage militarily. These protests were justifiably branded by many as anti-Semitic. There have been many calls for changes at numerous colleges. The only effective way to do that is by dismantling their DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs.

It is quite apparent that the connection is true. The explosion of anti-Semitism on campuses correlates to the growth of DEI staffing on college campuses. The more DEI staffing, the greater the increase in spreading the poison of DEI results and the disenfranchisement of disfavored groups like Jews.

Harvard is arguably the centerpiece of the anti-Semitism battle. After 34 student groups immediately protested against Israel, there was an immense backlash both nationally and from donors. Harvard’s president attended their Hillel’s Shabbat dinner (though not immediately) and denounced the school’s long history of anti-Semitism. This was a failed attempt to distract people from the current rampant anti-Semitism taking place. She then appointed an eight-member advisory committee charged with “disrupting and dismantling” anti-Semitism on campus.

We must start with the question of what happened to the last advisory committee. The Harvard Antisemitism Advisory Committee (HAAC) was established in 2019 to “advise the university on matters related to anti-Semitism and to recommend strategies for addressing anti-Semitism on campus.” The group had such impressive members as Ruth Wisse and RBG (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). They provided a list of suggestions to combat anti-Semitism on campus including hiring more staff to focus on prevention and education and developing a more robust reporting system for anti-Semitic incidents.

But unless you attack the source of the problem you have no chance of making changes. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Harvard at the rear of 248 participating colleges for a free speech environment. Harvard was rated abysmally with a score of -10 out of 100. It seems the prestigious HAAC had little effect on expanding free speech which is inherently necessary to the cause of minimizing anti-Semitism.

Their efforts for expanding education seem to have likewise fallen flat. A prime example of that failure is the annual Israeli Apartheid Week run by the Palestine Solidarity Committee. Let’s emphasize the malicious ignorance of the week’s title because there is nothing “apartheid” about Israel, whose population includes 21% Muslim Arabs.

There were murals calling Israel racist and white supremacists at this “hate fest.” Apparently, none of the sponsors have been to Israel. Jews are a religion, not a race. There are people of all races who are citizens of Israel including the two million Arabs. Only ignorant fools would call the only country in history to willingly bring blacks into their country (Ethiopian Jews) in order to gain freedom. Harvard’s newspaper, The Crimson, is a prime example of this foolishness. Their editorial board pronounced themselves “proudly supportive” of the murals and BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction). What hope is there for the new advisory committee to counter this hatred if their own editorial board badly missed any suggestions from the prior committee?

The new “Advisory Committee” has Dara Horn (author/professor/Harvard grad) and my longtime friend Rabbi David Wolpe (Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School), as a couple of top-notch choices. Do you think they can affect real change when the rest of the committee consists of Harvard establishment types? Will they address the failure of the previous prestigious panel and focus on the root cause of such intense anti-Semitism at Harvard? Or will it be another whitewash?

Planning for the Washington November 4th rally in support of Hamas has a foundation of roughly twenty groups. Each group has college chapters that freely operate on campus while Jewish groups are either banished or their speakers are cancelled. All of these groups are either far left politically or self-defined Marxist operations. They are welcomed and encouraged by the DEI regimes on campuses. You can trace the growth of these groups on campuses directly to the growth of DEI and the exploding amount of personnel dedicated to this profane idea.

When you want to eradicate a disease in a tree, particularly when it has spread throughout the entirety of the plant, you must rip it out from its roots. Otherwise, it will regenerate, and you will be back in the same place you started. The idea of DEI is not to boost the position of certain groups; it is to minimize the value of disfavored groups. Jews are a primary example of disfavored groups by the DEI complex. A solution that does not dismantle DEI will simply be a band-aid and the ill effects of anti-Semitism will continue to explode.

The support of Israel is not a Jewish value. The support of Israel is an American value and if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand America.

*****

This article was published by Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

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6 Bizarre Examples of How Voter Registration Fraud Happens thumbnail

6 Bizarre Examples of How Voter Registration Fraud Happens

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By Fred Lucas

Tennessee prosecutors charged 10 people with voter fraud last week after they allegedly registered and voted despite being legally ineligible to do so.

The Montgomery County District Attorney’s office secured grand jury indictments against the 10 Clarksville, Tennessee, residents with past felony convictions who are ineligible to vote in the state. These people registered and voted anyway, according to prosecutors.

As explained in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” federal law requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the official voter rolls “the names of ineligible voters.” This could include convicted felons who lost their voting rights as well as those who died or changed residences.

Here is an adapted excerpt from the book that looks at six notable and, in some cases, comical examples of voter registration scandals that dispel the Left’s myth that vote fraud doesn’t exist.

1. 25,000 Ineligible Voters in California

In 2018, the California state government admitted—after it was sued—that it mistakenly registered about 25,000 ineligible voters.

An example of this came after a Canadian, who was a permanent U.S. resident, contacted the Los Angeles Times to say he was improperly registered under the state’s automatic voter registration system.

Then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla said “persistent errors” like these would “undermine public confidence.”

2. Big Apple Sting

In 2013, the New York City Department of Investigations called for the New York City Board of Elections to clean up its voter rolls after a sting operation of sorts.

The 63 city investigators went to the polls signing in with the names of dead people or people who had moved out of the city, or signing in as convicted felons no longer eligible to vote.

Of those, 61 were cleared to vote. However, no illegal votes were cast.

3. Running in Maryland While Voting in Florida?

In Maryland, Wendy Rosen won the Democratic 1st Congressional District primary by defeating John LaFerla by 57 votes to win the right to challenge Republican Congressman Andy Harris in 2012.

However, she was forced to drop out two months before the November election when some Democrats pointed out that she had voted in both Florida and Maryland in 2006 and 2010. She had duplicate registrations and double-voted. She was fined $5,000 and sentenced to 500 hours of community service.

4. ACORN Scandal

In a 2008 case, Seattle workers with the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN, submitted 1,762 fraudulent voter registration forms.

ACORN leader Clifton Mitchell was convicted of false registration and served about three months in jail. Four other ACORN colleagues got jail time as well. Washington state also fined ACORN $25,000 to cover the cost of the investigation.

Then-Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed said, “This is the worst case of voter registration fraud in the history of the state of Washington.”

5. Lone Star Voting Troubles

In 2021, police reported catching Zul Mirza Mohamed—a candidate for mayor of Carrollton, Texas—in the act of stuffing envelopes with Dallas County absentee ballot applications.

But his activities allegedly ran even deeper. Investigators determined the candidate forged at least 84 voter registration forms. The Texas Attorney General’s Office charged him with 84 counts of mail ballot fraud.

6. Living in a UPS Store?

In 2021, former Republican Congressman Steve Watkins of Kansas cut a deal to avoid going to trial over voter fraud, saying that he would remain law abiding and pay a $250 fine.

Watkins was charged in 2020 for listing a UPS Store as his voting address and then voting in the wrong Topeka City Council race.

Prosecutors also charged him with interfering with law enforcement and for lying to Shawnee County detectives.

*****

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

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Universities Have Become Staging Grounds for American Pogroms thumbnail

Universities Have Become Staging Grounds for American Pogroms

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By Tony Kinnett

The American university system has finally gone beyond failure and has become an active threat to the United States and its people.

We have reached peak political irony as LGBTQ activists cry in the streets of college campuses for a group, Hamas, that would hang them from cranes. Universities that once proclaimed the virtues of the American melting pot have become a haven for those who tear down and shred pictures of Jewish children.

The Cooper Union, a private college in New York City, which allowed Jewish students to be trapped in a library as pro-Hamas protesters beat on the doors in an attempt to gain entrance, published a call for “vigilance” against microaggressions in 2018. This document of cultural “findings” from Cooper Union’s Diversity Task Force called on the institution to “identify and take positive actions that support student belonging, validation, and a community; that is, a supportive culture and climate for diversity to thrive.”

As Jewish students of Cooper Union witnessed on Oct. 25, the Left’s idea of “belonging” and “validation” doesn’t include them.

Students at George Mason University in Northern Virginia, Boston University, and New York University have been recorded via cellphone video over the past two weeks tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children currently being held hostage by Hamas.

These three universities have clear policies against the destruction of property, but only New York University has suggested that students caught tearing down posters may face disciplinary action.

George Mason University encourages staff and students to interrupt “microaggressions” as they’re happening—advising all to “prepare a strategy and rehearse” what to say in the event of witnessing a microaggression.

Yet, when a student was recorded tearing down a poster of a Jewish hostage on campus, the university chose to equally condemn the poster ripper and the one recording her tearing the poster down. George Mason scornfully called it “doxxing,” a colloquial term used to describe the process of posting a person’s private information online.

All of a sudden, George Mason is uncomfortable with the effects of “intervening” in a microaggression situation.

Curiously, although destruction of property is against the law (a Class 1 misdemeanor) in Virginia, George Mason University claims that the commonwealth’s attorney advised that “the conduct does not appear to be criminal in nature.” George Mason did not specify whether that refers to the student tearing down the poster or the one recording it.

This display of overt, undeniable hypocrisy confirms the pathetically weak and shallow principles of intersectional liberals.

Campus leftists that staged wild protests in anger over prominent right-leaning activists Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Charlie Kirk coming to speak about conservatism and liberty are cheering the hordes of pro-Hamas lunatics sweeping through buildings to hunt down Jews or posters of them.

We’re told by activist groups such as Black Lives Matter that Hamas’ proud display of rape and butchery are necessary acts of “decolonization,” inferring that “the Jews,” like Italians, Irish, Cubans, and Asians, have become too “white” for their own good.

These angry calls are not “dog whistles” like the Right has been accused of, such as whenever a politician makes the “OK” sign with his or her thumb and forefinger or when a man waves a Gadsden flag—but the stubborn and unabashed refusal to condemn a group that shoved babies into ovens, tied children’s rib cages together with wire, and raped wives in front of tortured husbands.

These proud advocates of “decolonization” chant genocidal slogans, praising leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, who will gladly tell any camera of their lust for the deaths of infidels and for the pogroms of centuries gone by, which left behind the corpses of Jews in Germany and Poland, and Christians in Armenia. 

It’s no wonder that donors have begun pulling funding from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. How can you, with a clear conscience, give money to an institution that welcomes and defends the supporters of those who promise they’ll hunt down you and your children?

Rip every last dollar of state funding, and each and every grant, from any university that tolerates this disgusting hatred for the Judeo-Christian communities that built this nation. It is no longer enough that we scoff at the insolence of youth on our smartphones, for these jihadists have already picked up far more dangerous weapons.

*****

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

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Biden Admin Targets Nation’s Largest Private Christian University [Grand Canyon University] thumbnail

Biden Admin Targets Nation’s Largest Private Christian University [Grand Canyon University]

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By Corinne Murdock

The Biden administration has set its sights on the largest private Christian university in the nation: Arizona’s Grand Canyon University (GCU).

For over half a decade the Department of Education (ED) has denied GCU’s IRS-granted nonprofit status. After GCU pushed back with legal action, the Biden administration responded with the full force of bureaucracy: a multi-agency attack to discredit and impose hefty fines on the university.

GCU President Brian Mueller told AZ Free News that ED’s rejection of a university’s IRS designation was new and unprecedented. Mueller maintained that ED offered “inapplicable criteria” for the denial.

The president couldn’t say with certainty whether the true cause of the ED targeting had to do with religious or political differences, but didn’t rule out the possibility.

“It’s obviously something other than the facts at hand,” said Mueller. “Is it because we have 30,000 graduates on an annual basis, where they’re studying from a Christian worldview?”

Although GCU is open about its Christian foundation and teachings, it doesn’t require its students to sign a statement of faith. Mueller estimated that 30 percent of incoming students don’t identify as Christians.

“We’re not a church, we’re a university,” said Mueller. “There’s free speech here. That’s one of the attractive things about us.”

GCU’s ethical positions do put it at odds with the federal government: GCU believes that God created the world and that truth comes from Him; that full personhood begins at the moment of conception and ceases at natural death; and that only the union between a man and a woman qualifies as a marriage.

“Resistance to the state is only appropriate when the state requires disobedience to the commands of God,” states GCU’s position on religious liberty. “Christian faith is a personal matter but the implications of faith in Christ should not and cannot remain private. Anyone who follows Christ in truth should strive to live in the way that Christ lived both in private and in public.”

In a public statement, GCU speculated that the targeting was due to ideological differences between their institution and the federal bureaucracy. GCU offers an education from a Christian worldview to its 30,000-odd graduates annually, though students aren’t required to sign a statement of faith. This year, the university brought in another 26,000 on-campus students and 92,000 online students.

“[W]e believe these agenda-driven actions are unprecedented against a regionally accredited 501(c)(3) designated nonprofit university and GCU categorically denies the claims being brought forth, which lack merit and illustrate extreme government overreach in what we believe is an attempt to harm a university to which individuals in these agencies are ideologically opposed,” said GCU.

ED has rejected GCU’s nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for over five years now. The IRS granted GCU its nonprofit status in July 2018; it took ED until November 2019 to deny the IRS classification, despite 26 other governmental, accrediting, and official entities accepting the nonprofit status including: the Arizona Corporation Commission, Arizona Private Postsecondary Board, Higher Learning Commission (HLC), and the NCAA.

ED maintains that since GCU’s majority revenues go to its former owner — Grand Canyon Education (GCE), a for-profit entity — that it doesn’t qualify as a nonprofit. GCU said that the revenues given to GCE were for education services at fair market value, as reported in investigations by two independent accounting and finance firms shared with the Biden administration.

GCU hasn’t raised its tuition in 15 years.

After GCU spent over a year attempting to resolve the ED denial, it sued the agency in February 2021. The timeline indicates that the lawsuit spurred a coordinated effort between ED, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to target GCU. Several months later, ED launched a multi-year, off-site review of GCU.

Then, in October 2021, the FTC named GCU as one of 70 for-profit institutions on which it would exercise a decades-dormant punitive power: the Penalty Offense Authority (POA). The FTC alleged GCU, among others, to be a “bad actor” engaging in “unfair or deceptive” practices regarding “false promises” of graduate job and earning prospects. Each violation incurs civil penalties of up to about $50,000 (about $43,800 in 2021).

In that October 2021 announcement, the FTC declared their action was a “resurrection” of the POA, in which they would coordinate with ED and VA; the last time the FTC exercised the POA was in 1978.

Under the POA, the FTC may seek civil penalties if it can prove that its target was aware that certain conduct was unfair or deceptive, and that the FTC had previously issued a written decision on the conduct in question.

The three agencies began their investigations into GCU in 2022: the FTC in May, ED in June (regarding doctoral degrees), and VA in October.

One of FTC’s main accusations was that GCU had a disproportionate number of students who defaulted on federal student loans; GCU responded that its students have a lower loan default rate than the national average at nonprofit universities. FTC also accused Grand Canyon Education, GCU’s education services provider, with making inappropriate cold calls to prospective students. GCU maintained that GCE only reaches out to students who contacted them with interest first, never cold calls.

ED alleged that GCU conveyed substantial misrepresentation regarding its doctoral degree cost. In response, GCU cited the recent federal district and appellate rulings in Young v. GCU, which denied similar claims, and their last Higher Learning Commission (HLC) report declaring robust and transparent financial information practices.

“Their recruitment and marketing materials are clear and transparent, and financial information presented to students throughout the student lifecycle is robust,” said HLC. “The information and resources provided are robust and thorough, providing prospective students a clear picture of their academic and financial path toward a degree at GCU.”

GCU also cited its public calculator for the estimated costs for a 60-credit doctoral program and any potential continuation courses needed to complete a doctoral dissertation. ED requires universities to provide cost of attendance estimates for first year in college to first-year, first-time students, and only for undergraduate programs. GCU also reported that it goes beyond that, providing direct cost estimates for each year of the program of the study and for all its degree programs.

ED also disputed that an online student’s posting of a bio on the first day of class didn’t qualify as “academic-related activity.” GCU countered that ED’s Office of General Counsel told GCU in a 2012 written statement that such postings met that requirement, and that no accrediting bodies, nor ED, have questioned that practice previously, including ED’s last program review in 2014, which made no mention of the practice as problematic.

ED claimed that a 2011 rule change preempted the general counsel’s 2012 email to the university. It required GCU to review all student files from July 2014 to June 2021.

Under VA authority, the Arizona Veterans Services State Approving Agency (AZ SAA) told GCU that its advertising on cybersecurity demand was “erroneous, deceptive, or misleading.” Specifically, the AZ SAA took issue with describing cybersecurity experts as being “in high demand” and that all companies “need cybersecurity.”

GCU said that once it refuted the claim, AZ SAA accepted their refutations as true. GCU claimed that the AZ SAA was pressured by the VA to carry out a different type of audit in order to find fault with GCU’s advertising language regarding cybersecurity.

“It is our belief the SAA was unduly influenced by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in conjunction with other federal agencies, to conduct and carry out a risk-based audit in this manner rather than the audits it has performed in the past in which the University has received stellar reviews,” said GCU.

GCU says it has spent thousands of man hours and millions of dollars in legal fees to fulfill the Biden administration’s requests. It noted that these ongoing costs and potential fines threaten to upend its 15-year freeze on tuition — a major factor for its growth and, as a result, exposure of a Christian worldview-based education to more Americans.

“[B]ecause GCU, like almost all private universities, is dependent on tuition as a primary revenue stream and does not receive state funding like state universities, the university may be forced to raise tuition if the legal fees or fines associated with these actions continue to escalate,” stated the university. “We are, in essence, trying to protect our students from this government overreach.”

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‘The Elephant in the Room’: The Real Source of Jew-Hatred in the Middle East thumbnail

‘The Elephant in the Room’: The Real Source of Jew-Hatred in the Middle East

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By Lawrence A. Franklin

For [many Muslims], the Koran, every word of it, is the dictated word of Allah (God) as told by the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) to Allah’s prophet Muhammad….

Ten years ago, U.S. soldiers being deployed to the Middle East who flew to Qatar or Kuwait on the United Arab Emirates airline, before the UAE’s supreme leadership in spearheading the Abraham Accords, reported that on maps in-flight brochures, a country named Israel did not exist. Many seem to be working now to make that a reality, not just on a map.

The “elephant in the room,” which few commentators have had the courage to explore, is that for many Muslims, “Jew-hatred” is dogma. The 114 sura (chapters) of the Koran are replete with passages of Jew-hatred. Pictured: Adolf Hitler meets with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, on November 28, 1941.

(Image source: German Federal Archive)

“We are not sub-humans. Let me repeat: We are not sub-humans,” said Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian Authority’s representative to the United Nations, after the sub-human atrocities inflicted on innocent civilians in Israel by his fellow Palestinian Arabs. He felt the need to repeat the claim twice last month at an emergency session of the of the UN General Assembly, possibly to try to convince anyone he could. Hamas and Iran reportedly masterminded the murderous invasion. Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to hold at least 240 Israeli hostages in Gaza.

It was not long before media commentators, after the October 7 mass murder in Israeli towns and villages near Gaza, began to air pro-Hamas demonstrators on college campuses and in the streets of US cities. Many of these demonstrators openly rationalized and even defended the actions of Hamas.

Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi gave a supposed history lesson about Israel’s 1948 War of Independence during which, he claimed, Jews ethnically cleansed Palestinian Arabs from their land. In reality, five Arab armies attacked Israel a few hours after its birth on May 15 1948, and then lost. Some of the Arabs who lived in the area that became Israel left of their own volition during the war, at the request of Arab leader that they “get out of the way” of the invading Arab armies. Israel did not allow them to return after the war, stating that they had not been loyal. Thus the “Palestinians” were born – between 472,000 and 650,000 people who found themselves stateless when the country they had refused to defend refused to let them back. Approximately 160,000 Arabs remained in Israel through the war and were granted full citizenship in the new state.

The Palestinians’ rich Arab “brothers” would not grant them citizenship in their countries and instead dumped them into often squalid refugee camps – for which they blamed Israel.

By contrast, nearly 1 million Jews were expelled or forced to flee from Arab and Muslim countries beginning in 1948, and they were welcomed into tiny, impoverished Israel and granted citizenship.

Arabs have since referred to a war that they started and lost as the nakba (catastrophe), and continue to blame Israel for not cooperating in its own elimination. Perhaps they should have thought of that before starting the war.

Gazans are now apparently calling their situation of being bombarded by Israel a “new nakba.” Left unmentioned is that this new so-called nakba is a direct response to the October 7 Arab invasion and murder of 1,400 Jews in a single day, including babies beheaded and burned alive. Other commentators referred to the 16-year blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt to justify their current anger – again “forgetting” the sickening assault on October 7. The Arabs are also “forgetting” that the blockade was established because the Gazans were smuggling in vast quantities of weapons and ammunition with which to murder Jews. Why won’t those irritating Jews just let themselves be killed?

The “elephant in the room,” which few commentators have had the courage to explore, is that for many Muslims, “Jew-hatred” is dogma. For them, the Koran, every word of it, is the dictated word of Allah (God) as told by the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) to Allah’s prophet Muhammad. The Koran does not, like much of the Bible, consist of descriptive stories that can be believed or not as the reader wished. It is more proscriptive, like the Ten Commandments. One cannot say, “Oh, He didn’t really mean the one about adultery.”

Like it or not, this “divine” word of Allah, compiled in the 114 sura (chapters) of the Koran, is replete with passages of Jew-hatred, such as the verse:

“So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterward or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. That [is the command].” — K

oran 47:4, Sahih International translation

Beheading “infidels” is a centuries-long tradition in Islam, and still used today: a teacher, Samuel Paty, in France who showed his students “controversial” Mohammad cartoons; a British soldier, Lee Rigby, in the United Kingdom, and, this month, babies in Israel (here and here).

Hamas includes this command in its original charter — in particular Article 7 — which advocates not only destroying Israel but killing Jews worldwide. In 2014 Hamas had planned a similar assault on the villages and towns near the border with Gaza. Hamas terrorists, at least 200 of them, had planned to invade through their Gaza-based tunnel system around the Jewish New Year holiday of Rosh Hashanah (that year, September 24). Israeli security services noted that Hamas had plans to kidnap Israeli citizens in this earlier plan as well.

In the Koran, Allah has cursed the Jews for the unseemly manner in which the Koran described the Hebrews treating and disobeying the prophets of God. This “divine” curse includes scattering the Jews throughout the globe, forever exiling them from their ancient homeland.

Some “true believer” Muslims therefore feel they have the right to murder Jews anywhere at any time. They believe there is no credence in the historical reality of a biblical Israel, no legitimacy in the geopolitical areas of Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank). Those they call “Zionists” (meaning Israelis and Jews), despite having lived in the land continuously for nearly 4,000 years, are falsely labeled “occupiers” and “colonialists” who must be made to disappear. There is to be no “Jewish National Home” as guaranteed by post-World War II international agreements and the UN.

The real dispute from that brand of Islamic Jew-hatred is not about land, or “refugees” or a “two-state solution.” It is about the refusal by many Muslims to co-exist with Jews. The anti-Israel chant of pro-Palestinian protestors is: “From the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, Palestine will be free” — meaning “free” of Jews. This hoped-for Islamist outcome is reinforced in Arab school textbooks, maps that omit Israel, and even crossword puzzles. Ten years ago, U.S. soldiers being deployed to the Middle East who flew to Qatar or Kuwait on the United Arab Emirates airline, before the UAE’s supreme leadership in spearheading the Abraham Accords, reported that on maps in flight brochures, a country named Israel did not exist. Many seem to be working now to make that a reality, not just on a map.

Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin was the Iran Desk Officer for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He also served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

*****

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

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot Forbes

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The Riddle of Ray Epps Continues thumbnail

The Riddle of Ray Epps Continues

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By The Editors

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Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

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0 0 The Editors 2023-11-06 07:43:00The Riddle of Ray Epps Continues

Another “Hawkish Hold” with Tightening Bias: Fed Keeps Rates at 5.50% Top…‘The Elephant in the Room’: The Real Source of Jew-Hatred in the…

An AZ Invitation to Voter Fraud: Unstaffed Drop Boxes Jeopardize the Safety and Security of Our Elections thumbnail

An AZ Invitation to Voter Fraud: Unstaffed Drop Boxes Jeopardize the Safety and Security of Our Elections

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By Arizona Free Enterprise Club

Following in the footsteps of his predecessor (now-Governor Katie Hobbs), Secretary of State Adrian Fontes appears determined to implement an Election Procedures Manual (EPM) that is ripe with unlawful provisions. The EPM is used by election officials throughout the state as the rulebook to conduct and run elections, so it is critically important that every provision in the manual strictly adheres to state law.

Now, fresh off an important legal win over the illegal signature verification process in the EPM, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, along with the Thomas More Society, is suing Fontes once again—this time over unstaffed ballot drop boxes.

An Illegal Method of Voting

Arizona law establishes four different methods for secure early voting. According to A.R.S. § 16-548(A), an early ballot shall either be:

Delivered to the officer in charge of elections, typically the county recorder.

Mailed to the officer in charge of elections, typically the county recorder.

Deposited by the voter at any polling place in the county.

Deposited by the voter’s agent (family member, household member, caregiver) at any polling place in the county.

Did you catch that? Nowhere in the law does it allow for the use of unstaffed drop boxes. In fact, if you read through Fontes’ EPM, you’ll notice something. Although the EPM includes over 1,000 citations, the section on its unstaffed drop box scheme includes zero citations of Arizona law! You can see for yourself right here. And yet, Fontes still moved forward with this invented option in the final draft of the EPM he submitted to Governor Hobbs and Attorney General Mayes. But the omission of such citations is only one problem with drop boxes.

Drop Boxes Lack the Protections of the USPS

Unlike U.S. Postal Service (USPS) mail collection boxes, unstaffed drop boxes don’t enjoy special protections under federal law that could lead to prison sentences for crimes like obstruction of mail passage, destruction of mail, and vandalism of a mailbox. On top of that, these unstaffed drop boxes aren’t required to have locks. Instead, they are “secured” with a “tamper-evident seal.” (Who could get past such a fortress of security?) And, while the USPS requires mail carriers to take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution, Fontes’ EPM creates the position of “ballot retriever.” Do you know what it takes to qualify as a “ballot retriever”? An individual simply needs to wear a badge when performing his or her duties! That’s it! It’s right there in the EPM.

Then, there’s the simple fact that USPS mailboxes offer an additional level of security because they can contain different varieties of mail at any given time. This makes it impossible for a bad actor to know whether a particular mailbox contains early voted ballots. By contrast, an unstaffed drop box contains only completed ballots, providing anyone who wants to interfere with an election the certainty to know that the contents of the drop box likely contain a significant number of completed ballots.

Other Issues with Drop Boxes

Along with lacking the protections of the USPS, unstaffed drop boxes also increase the possibility of voter intimidation. After all, when a person approaches a drop box, it’s clear that he or she has no reason to be there except to deliver a voted ballot. This makes that person an easy and vulnerable target, which is much less likely to occur at a mailbox or an election official’s office.

And finally, there’s the issue of unsecure locations. Fontes’ EPM doesn’t require unstaffed drop boxes to be located at or near a government building. Because of this drop boxes have been established at churches, elementary schools, restaurants, bookstores, humane societies, and more. In fact, some drop boxes in Yavapai County have been placed at U.S. Postal Offices—mere feet away from a mailbox where voters could legally return their ballots. (You can’t make this stuff up…)

For all these reasons and more, the Free Enterprise Club filed a lawsuit last week in the Yavapai County Superior Court. The use of drop boxes must be in accordance with state law, and we are hopeful that our lawsuit will result in election officials ending their use at illegal unstaffed locations for the 2024 election. This would give the people of Arizona exactly what they want: elections where it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network

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Join our FREE Grassroots Action List to stay up to date on the latest battles against big government and how YOU can help influence crucial bills at the Arizona State Legislature.

*****

This article was published by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and is reproduced with permission.

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The Pro-Hamas Left Is Warming Up For Real Violence

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By John Daniel Davidson

The emerging Red-Green alliance is poised to plunge the country into a spat of civic violence comparable to the summer of 2020, or worse.

Talk about bad timing. On Wednesday, the White House announced a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia,” the necessity of which, according to awkwardly scripted remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris, is that Muslims endure a disproportionate number of “hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents.”

Leave it to the Biden White House to pick a moment when a wave of antisemitism is surging across America to announce this. Set aside the dearth of evidence that Muslims face persecution or discrimination in mainstream American society. Last year set a record for anti-Jewish hate crimes, breaking the previous record that was set the year before. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, antisemitism has erupted in our cities and on campuses, this time with the imprimatur and cooperation of the identitarian left. The idea that now is the time to address Islamophobia is so out of touch with the reality of the moment, only the Biden-Harris administration could possibly have come up with it.

But the announcement inadvertently serves to highlight a rather disturbing development in our civic life. At this point, some three weeks removed from the Hamas slaughter of 1,400 Israelis, it’s hard to deny that we have a domestic constituency for Hamas in this country. Generally speaking, it’s comprised of a broad swath of the woke left together with a broad swath of Muslim-Americans, united in what amounts to an unstable Red-Green alliance.

It’s also easy to see that this Hamas constituency is warming up for a season of real violence.

We’ve all seen the recent videos of self-righteous Hamas sympathizers tearing down posters of missing or kidnapped Israeli children. In almost every case, their actions are accompanied by either a defiant callousness or a dead-eyed nonchalance. Pleading with them or interrogating them is pointless, as every person who has tried to do so on camera has quickly discovered. These people are antisemites, and it’s not possible to shame them out of their antisemitism. They own it gladly.

But this week, a different sort of video appeared on social media. A group of Jews in Manhattan’s Upper East Side physically protected a bunch of posters of Israeli child hostages from an antisemite who was trying to tear them down. The man, who of course covered his face with a keffiyeh, tried to force his way through and a scuffle ensued. Eventually, a cop pulled up and appeared to arrest the man as a crowd gathered.

The incident illustrates the violence lurking just beneath the surface of the antisemitic, pro-Hamas sentiment now manifesting all across the country. The kind of people who are willing to casually rip down posters of children taken hostage by terrorists are not those who have any kind of principled commitment to nonviolence. They might or might not individually be cowards, but they clearly have no problem with violence as such — see, for example, the BLM posters celebrating Hamas paragliders who slaughtered more than 250 Israeli concertgoers on Oct. 7.

This is especially true on our nation’s college campuses. This week at Harvard, whose students have staged some of the most blatant and vile pro-Hamas demonstrations, including straightforward calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, a group of keffiyeh-waving students surrounded and then assaulted a Jewish student who was simply trying to get away from them.

Some of these assailants have been identified, like Ibrahim Bharmal, a student at Harvard Law School and an editor at the Harvard Law Review, as well as Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a student of Harvard Divinity School. That a Harvard law student feels free to harass and assault Jews on campus — the opposite of what we should expect from a student of the law — suggests not only that antisemitism on campus is a real threat to Jewish students but that the pro-Hamas woke left is growing in boldness, and is reasonably confident it can target individual Jews on campus with impunity.

Jon Levine called the Harvard assault a LARP pogrom, which is exactly what it was. And as we know from 2020, left-wing riot and assault LARPers eventually get around to the real thing. Indeed, all the elements are falling into place for a season of civic violence of the kind we saw during the summer of 2020. The White House’s ham-fisted campaign against Islamophobia is all the confirmation you need that Jewish Americans, not Muslims, are the ones in real danger right now.

This is something of a pattern on the left. When a dangerous or unstable element in its coalition is revealed as such, the official narrative is to pretend that element is under unique threat from the American mainstream. Look at the media and Democrat reaction to the mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville back in March. The shooter was Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as a man. She killed three children and three adults before police took her out. Hale was mentally unwell and left behind a kind of trans-shooter manifesto, which was suspiciously never released to the public.

In the wake of the shooting, all we heard from the corporate press and Democratic leaders was that transgender Americans were under threat. Not a word about how transgender ideology attracts mentally unstable, unwell people who need help, not affirmation. That was not the conversation they wanted to have, even after the slaughter of six innocent people.

Likewise, we’re going to hear a lot more about how Muslims and left-wing Hamas apologists are the real victims, even as Jewish students suffer escalating attacks, harassment, and threats. Make no mistake, the violent rhetoric you hear at these pro-Hamas rallies, the revolting practice of tearing down posters of Israeli children taken hostage, the targeting of individual Jewish students on campus — it’s all leading somewhere very bad.

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

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Hamas Repeats History

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By Craig J. Cantoni

At the same time, increasing numbers of Americans don’t know history or cherry-pick history for political purposes.

The massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas brought me back to eighth grade in parochial school, where something happened that changed how I saw the world and human nature.

What happened was that the nuns showed a shocking film of a Nazi concentration camp right after American soldiers had liberated it.  There were ghastly scenes of emaciated Jews standing about in a daze, half-cremated bodies in ovens, and piles of bodies, spectacles, and gold teeth.

Even at that young age, I wondered how humans could do that to other humans.

Looking for an answer, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as soon as the 900-page book came out in paperback.  That was followed by over a half-century of reading not only history but also philosophy, ethics, economics, and literature.

At the rate of at least one book every two weeks, that comes to over 1,300 books and counting.

That doesn’t make me erudite or particularly intelligent, but at least I know that I don’t know a lot.  That’s more than college students know.  Over four years, they’ll have read a tiny fraction of that amount, yet they believe that they are well-educated and have all the answers, including about the complexities of Palestine.

Shame on colleges for letting students make fools of themselves by demonstrating how little they’ve learned.  And double shame for using naïve students as political pawns to advance sophomoric notions about social justice, race, and economics, with the latest being the inane notion of decolonization—a notion that is used to justify what Hamas did and to vilify not only Israelis but also Americans, Europeans, and White people in general.

It shouldn’t have to be said, but atrocities, slavery, subjugation, and colonization are not unique to Whites of European ancestry.  It has to be said, though, because generations of American youth don’t seem to know better.

Nor is it profound to state the truth that human evil is universal.  But compared to the selective and simplistic history taught in American schools, it is profound to say so.

The sad fact is that Hamas-like brutality has been common throughout history—albeit without the disgusting celebrations and glee shown by Hamas as they documented their atrocities via modern video technology.  Common or not, the atrocities committed by Hamas are not something to excuse and certainly not to applaud.

Not only has slaughtering been common throughout history, but it has also been common across just about all races, ethnic groups, religions, ideologies, and nationalities.  Also, contrary to American mythology about diversity, it’s been more common where different ethnocultural groups have mingled, interacted and shared borders.

Take the Baltic and Eastern European countries sandwiched between Russia and Germany.  The acclaimed book Bloodlands details the atrocities committed by Soviets and Nazis in those countries before and during the Second World War. This history goes against the conventional ignorance on campus and elsewhere about fascists being worse than communists.

Ukraine was one of the countries caught between the two dictatorships.  However, in an example of how history isn’t black and white, and how victims can also be victimizers, Ukrainians were also guilty of atrocities, as detailed in another acclaimed book:  Iron Curtain:  The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 – 1956. As the German Army was retreating and the Soviet Army was advancing, Ukrainian partisans saw an opportunity to establish their own sub-state, by cleansing the Polish population from a territory adjoining Poland.  They would go on to slaughter 50,000 Poles, most of whom were civilians, including women and children.

No doubt campus racists would use this as an example of the innate evil of Whites.  In doing so, they would miss a key point:  that if history is peeled back far enough, butchery will be found among every race and nearly every ethnocultural group.  Go back far enough, and archaeological evidence can be found of Homo sapiens killing off Neanderthals.

It would take many pages to list the horrors inflicted by non-Whites and non-Europeans on each other.  Again, that’s not to excuse or minimize the horrors inflicted by Whites on, let’s say, Africans in the slave trade or on Native Americans in the westward conquest and genocide.  Nor is it to deny the need to address the lingering socioeconomic effects of those historic injustices. 

Rather, it is to warn against generalizing and demonizing selected groups for the sins of their ancestors, if for no other reason than the fact that nearly all peoples have evil in their ancestry and thus can be generalized and demonized in return, in a never-ending cycle of recrimination.

Take Native Americans, or to use a voguish term, the indigenes who first inhabited what came to be known as the Americas.

Sure, the indigenes were persecuted, oppressed, and brutalized by Whites.  Sure, they lost their way of life and were consigned to reservations and to welfare dependency.  Sure, the conditions on many reservations are awful.

But it’s also true that before Columbus sailed west, there was a warrior culture among many tribes, a culture in which cruelty was honored and celebrated.  Captured enemy males were subjected to gruesome torture, young women were enslaved, elderly women were killed or left to die in the elements, and babies were killed by such methods as swinging them by their feet to bash their heads against a tree.

The contrast between warrior tribes like the Comanche and peaceful tribes like the Navajo was quite stark.  But even tribes that had a reputation for relative peacefulness were capable of atrocities. Take the Tohono O’odham tribe, whose community abuts my adopted hometown of Tucson, a city where it is increasingly common for a public meeting to begin with a recognition (virtue-signal) that the meeting is taking place on former Native-American land.

On April 28, 1871, the O’odham took the lead in what became known as the Camp Grant massacre.  Ninety-two of them joined six Anglo Americans and 48 Mexican Americans, in an attack on a camp of Aravaipa and Pinal Apache, while most of the Apache men were away on a hunting party.  In total, 144 camp residents were slaughtered, and all but eight of the dead were women and children.  Nearly all were scalped.  Twenty-nine children were sold into slavery in Mexico by the O’odham and the Mexicans.

Keep in mind that the Apache had been driven out of their homeland and into Arizona by the Comanche, who conquered vast amounts of territory and engaged in slavery.  Imagine what the Comanche would have done if they had had warships, standing armies with the latest weaponry and tactics, a central government and administrative state, and a mint and treasury to fund it all.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the 1871 massacre resembles the massacre of Israelis by Hamas 152 years later.  After all, although many institutions have changed for the better, and although liberal democracy has advanced human rights more than any other political system and is the best hope for mankind, human nature hasn’t changed much.

With that, I’ll return to the question I asked in eighth grade:  How can humans do this to other humans?

The answer, of course, is human nature, especially the tribalistic part of human nature.  The potential for violence lies dormant in people until awakened by some catalyst.  Typically, the catalyst is the stereotyping and demonization of another group for real or perceived injustices, even long-ago ones, coupled with envy or ideological fanaticism.

For example, Hitler probably wouldn’t have come to power if it hadn’t been for the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty after the First World War, especially the demand for onerous reparations and the French occupation of the Rhineland.  This in turn enabled him to demonize Jews, although they had little to do with conditions in Germany.

Incidentally, I disagree with much of what author Robert Kagan has written, but he made a valid point in his book, The Ghost at the Feast, that the Second World War probably wouldn’t have happened if the U.S. had left a few thousand peacekeeping troops in the Rhineland, had repealed the excesses of the Versailles Treaty, and had helped to establish a liberal democracy in Germany.  In turn, if WWII hadn’t happened, tens of millions of people wouldn’t have been killed, the Holocaust wouldn’t have taken place, cities wouldn’t have been destroyed, and the Soviet Union wouldn’t have occupied Eastern Europe and followed with mass starvation, purges, and gulags.

Let’s return to the USA and conclude with a warning.

A dangerous situation is building within the nation as a result of a number of divisive forces, including the illiberalism of the far right and far left, the demagoguery at the extremes of both parties, the identity politics in which everyone is assigned an invented racial label, the popular contest of victimhood to see which identity group has been oppressed the most and in the most ways, the exclusion and discrimination masquerading as inclusion and diversity, the demonization of Whites (and Jews once again) based on ugly stereotypes and often driven by revenge and envy, and the cherry-picking of history for political purposes.

It is doubtful that these forces will result in mass atrocities, but there is little doubt that if left unchecked, they will lead to an irreparable tearing of the social fabric.

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Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Steeped in Islamic Orthodoxy, Hamas Is Israel’s Permanent Enemy

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By Srdja Trifkovic

Editors Note: The latest manifestation of the war between Western Civilization and radical political Islamism, is the current Israeli-Gaza War.  But the US has been deeply involved since 911, despite our haphazard retreat from Afghanistan. The Western mind just recoils at the idea of facing over one billion Muslims who are susceptible to the propaganda of a minority of radical Islamists.  The multicultural mind sees no difference between cultures and civilizations, and for us to think we are somewhat more civilized, is viewed as chauvinistic.  But it isn’t.  We don’t want their civilization, and for good reason.  All cultures are not equal.  It is a clash of civilizations. Yet our leaders continue the dangerous fiction that we don’t have the moral right to defend our way of life and that large numbers of people who hate our civilization are great to invite into the country.  Europe is now likely, fatally comprised by such notions. Radical Muslims are at least consistent.  They believe what they believe.  They fight for what they believe. We in the West now don’t know what we believe, and if we do, we have been taught it was awful by the cultural Marxists who dominate the high points of education and culture.  As a result, we fire a few shots off and retreat hoping they still don’t want to come after us and that they do not intend to pursue their goals of conquering us.  After the failure of partition in 1948, numerous wars, and endless negotiations the Left in both Israel and the US continued to peddle the fiction of a two-state solution.  As proven by the recent events, that simply gives the Islamists a territory to use to prepare for eventual subjugation. It takes two sides to agree to a two-state solution and Islamists never have agreed to the proposition. The ultimate solution must come from within Islam itself. We should encourage that but that is hard to do when your own position is philosophical jello. Until reform sweeps Islam, one has to enter into the battle of ideas and keep a strong military.  But if one no longer believes in the validity of one’s own civilization, then we will lose the battle of ideas and eventually weaken ourselves militarily.  Why fight for something you don’t believe in? Israel’s battle is a fight for all who believe in Western civilization. But is it just one front in a war we don’t want to admit even exists.  The struggle for us didn’t end with the retreat from Afghanistan.  If anything, our inability to understand both the spiritual and military power of our adversary has encouraged their advance.

In the Holy Land, faith has never been a wholly private affair separable from political, cultural, and ethnic motives and sensibilities. This is more clearly the case now than it was a generation ago. Thus, the conflict between Israel and its neighbors, which may otherwise have been amenable to the traditional forms of diplomatic horse trading, has been transformed into a civilizational and religious clash beyond politics.

Hamas and other Islamist groups are founded on the notion which, for them, is indisputably scripturally correct: Accepting Israel’s legitimacy is incompatible with Islamic teaching. It says that when the infidels usurp a Muslim land, jihad becomes mandatory. According to the Hamas Charter, the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf (endowment) consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day:

It, or any part of it, should not be squandered; it, or any part of it, should not be given up. There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.

A permanent peace settlement is structurally impossible because any lasting compromise that would entail legitimizing Israel would be not only treasonous but blasphemous. From the Muslim point of view, there is nothing extraordinary about this view. It is derived from the Koran, from Muhammad’s sayings collected in the Hadith, and from the political tradition which is 14 centuries old. Giving up any part of Palestine would be a disobedient act of irreverence against Allah. Intransigence is al-hal-wahid (“the only right way” ). Struggle is a sacred duty, rather than merely a patriotic one.

Fighting Israel is more than a “war of national liberation”: it is an act of worship for which Allah will reward the mujaheed. In addition to the verses of the Koran, there are dozens of hadiths with Muhammad’s assurances that Allah guarantees to all jihadi warriors instant paradise in case of martyrdom, or plentiful reward to the survivors. “And whoever fights in Allah’s cause—whether they achieve martyrdom or victory—We will honour them with a great reward.” (Koran, surah An-Nisa, ayat 74 ) This promise remains to this day a powerful incentive to would-be martyrs, from Gaza and Ramallah to south Lebanon. To be a mujaheed is a win-win proposition to the teeming masses of angry Palestinian youths with no employment and no prospects.

Hardcore Islamism used to be confined to a minority among educated Arab elites until the late 20th century. The drastic decline of Islam’s power in relation to Europe after 1918 prompted those elites to frame the search for national-cultural identity and political empowerment in terms of Arab nationalism with distinctly secular overtones. Pan-Arabism, rather than Islam, became the major theme. After World War II, and particularly with the creation of the state of Israel, pan-Arabists went beyond promoting a sense of common heritage and started promoting the creation of a unitary Arab state.

The traditionalist religious masses could also support pan-Arabism because it retained much of the Islamic vocabulary. The term umma, the community of the faithful, was customized to refer to the Arab nation (al-umma al-’arabiyya).  After the 1952 revolution in Egypt, Arab nationalism became secular, leftist, and anti-Western. It was anti-Israeli in an overtly anticolonial sense: Israel was perceived as a Western outpost settled by Europeans and Americans in an Arab land.

Until around 1990 such wider Arab elite proclivities also applied to the Palestinian political mainstream. The Fatah/PLO resistance to Israel depended for support on pan-Arab sentiment abroad and the promotion of a secular “Palestinian” identity at home. The grand step came with the collapse of the USSR. In the aftermath of the abortive global secularist project, young Arabs turned to Allah in droves. The first overtly religious clash between Jews and Arabs since 1948 took place on Oct. 8, 1990, when a bloody riot broke out on the Temple Mount. Israeli police killed at least 17 Palestinians and wounded a hundred. Riots soon spread all over the West Bank, which was nothing new; the protesters were shouting Allahu akbar, which was a novelty.

Before long, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah became household names. They were able to build a substantial power base and an infrastructure that covers Islamic, charitable, political, and military activities. The founder and head of Hamas, the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, ingeniously merged the nationalist watchwords of the secularist Arab pre-1990s resistance to Israel with his hardliner views based on the tenets of orthodox Sunni Islam. 

A mirror image is a Jewish claim that the modern state of Israel is the embodiment of a biblical covenant, effectively a Waqf under another name. Secular Israelis, including the late prime minister Golda Meir  (“Israel exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy”), and the country’s founders before her, have utilized such claims as propaganda tools whenever it suited their needs.

The alliance of religion and nationalism in the Arab-Israeli dispute has been detrimental to the quest for a lasting solution. On the Palestinian side, it created a mendacious duality of approach that allowed temporary compromise as a short-term expedient, while the destruction of the State of Israel remained the only divinely ordained and therefore legitimate long-term outcome. Some politicians of the Fatah old guard have pretended otherwise, talking of the need for renewed diplomacy, but the community defers to those who invoke Islam to deny the possibility of peace.

It is necessary to be aware of the ambitions of political Islam and to harbor no illusions about its goals. Yitzhak Rabin was not engaging in mere propaganda when he declared, in Dec. 1992, that his country’s “struggle against murderous Islamic terror is also meant to awaken the world, which is lying in slumber.” 

We should be no less aware, however, that in Israel the problem of Palestinian jihadism is used as an alibi for self-defeating policies that effectively facilitate the growth of Islamic radicalism.

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This article was published by Chronicles and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Ranked-Choice Voting Is The Monster Under The Bed Of American Elections

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By Shawn Fleetwood

Ranked-choice voting ‘is a scheme of the Left to disenfranchise voters and elect more Democrats,’ a new report found.

Democrats are using ranked-choice voting (RCV) to benefit their party and disenfranchise voters in elections across the country, a new report provided to The Federalist found.

Published by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), the new analysis unearths how Democrats use the complexities associated with RCV to diminish confidence in elections among U.S. voters. Under RCV, often dubbed “rigged-choice voting” by its critics, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate.

This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

While both major political parties have a history of promoting RCV, it’s primarily Democrats who are pushing states and localities to adopt the practice for future elections. As noted by FGA, of the 74 pro-RCV bills introduced in state legislatures this past year, 57 “had only Democrat sponsors.” Meanwhile, “just eight percent of the total bills received bipartisan support,” with Republicans introducing 16 of the 17 bills opposing ranked-choice voting.

“Both the number of bills supportive and opposed to ranked-choice voting saw a large uptick in 2023,” the report reads. “Part of the reason for this increase is legislators have seen the system allow less popular Democrats beat more popular Republicans in federal races in both Maine and Alaska.”

While RCV proponents often claim the system “guarantees that elected officials receive majority support from the electorate,” election outcomes in Alaska and Maine — both of which have adopted RCV — show the exact opposite is true.

In Alaska, Democrat Mary Peltola won the state’s at-large congressional seat last year even though “nearly 60 percent of voters [cast] their ballots for a Republican.” As noted by FGA, this race also saw nearly 15,000 votes discarded due to so-called “ballot exhaustion.” The term “ballot exhaustion” is used to describe when voters select only one candidate on their ballot, and those ballots are tossed because their first choice didn’t win a majority in the first round.

Of the nearly 15,000 “exhausted” ballots thrown out in Alaska’s special congressional election, more than 11,000 were from voters who “voted for only one Republican candidate and no one else,” according to the report. RCV also played a major role in helping Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski win reelection during the 2022 midterms, which reportedly saw the “lowest voter turnout percentage on record.”

Election outcomes contradicting the desires of voters were also documented in a 2018 Maine congressional race. In that election, then-incumbent GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin lost to Democrat Jared Golden despite Poliquin winning the most votes in the first round of voting. According to FGA, more than 8,000 ballots were deemed “exhausted” and effectively thrown out.

“These ballots are not just pieces of paper, each is connected to a voter and his or her preference,” the report reads. “By throwing away these ballots, ranked-choice voting is erasing their opinion and leaving their voice unheard in the democratic system.”

But discarded ballots are just one of the many problems associated with RCV. In jurisdictions that employ RCV, delayed election results and errors have become the norm. During New York City’s 2021 Democrat mayoral primary, for example, it took “a week of counting and 11 rounds of tabulations” before city officials determined that “135,000 test ballots had been counted by mistake.” It took nearly a month and eight rounds of counting before a winner was ultimately declared.

Voter confusion about how RCV works has also presented its challenges. After using the system for a June 20 primary election, officials in Arlington, Virginia, opted not to use the practice for its upcoming fall elections, “pointing to confusion about the process” among voters and “concerns about whether outreach efforts were translating to diverse support for the new system.”

FGA concluded its report by calling on lawmakers to follow the lead of states such as Florida and Tennessee by banning the use of RCV in future elections.

“This complicated and confusing form of counting votes is not a non-partisan solution to give voters greater voice,” the report reads. “It is a scheme of the Left to disenfranchise voters and elect more Democrats.”

Other states that have banned RCV in recent years include South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana.

*****

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

Image Credit: Nast cartoon on Wikimedia Commons

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The Average Cost of Public School Education Is 58% More Than Private School

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By James D. Agresti

The average cost of private schools is a vital fact for understanding issues like school choice and public school spending. This is because it provides a market-based comparison to the cost of government schools. Yet, the U.S. Department of Education hasn’t published an estimate for the average cost of private K–12 schools since 1995.

To fill this decades-long gap, Just Facts conducted extensive research to develop a methodology that reliably measures private school spending. Beyond analyzing academic papers and government reports, Just Facts performed data checks and corresponded with the Department of Education and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to ensure accuracy.

Applying this method to the latest available data, the average inflation-adjusted cost of private K–12 schools in the 2019–20 school year was $9,709 per student. In contrast, the cost for public schools was $17,013 per student—or 75% more than private schools.

Public schools have a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, who cost more to educate than other students. Accounting for this difference, the average cost of educating children in public schools is now 58% greater than in private schools.

However, the cost premium of public schools is almost certainly larger than 58%. This is because government data on public school spending excludes some key items.

Coupled with data on student outcomes, these findings have major implications for the state of the public education system and how to improve it.

Historical Data

In a 1995 working paper, the Department of Education (DOE) estimated that “total expenditures for private schools in 1991–92 (including operating expenses and capital) were between $18.0 and $19.4 billion,” and the cost per student was “between $3,350 and $3,600.”

For the same school year, the DOE reported that public schools spent an average of $5,626 per student.

Comparing those figures, the average cost of public school education in 1991–92 was about 56–68% more than private school.

Since then, the DOE has published the average full tuition for private K–12 schools in 2011–12, but there is a significant difference between this figure and actual costs. That’s because full tuition, or the “sticker price,” is “the highest annual tuition charged for a full-time student.” The actual amounts paid by individuals are often much lower because they receive discounts for reasons such as having low income, siblings in the school, or a parent who is a teacher.

Since 1992, inflation-adjusted average public school spending per student has risen by 47%, and the DOE hasn’t published new data on private school spending. Thus, a fresh comparison of the cost differential between public and private schools is needed.

Just Facts’ Methodology

To determine the cost of private schools, Just Facts measures all income to them, including tuition payments, charitable donations, and government spending on private school programs. This is accomplished by summing federal data on:

All of the data and calculations are available in this spreadsheet. The bottom line result is that the average inflation-adjusted cost of private K–12 education in the 2019–20 school year was $9,709 per student.

This compares to the DOE’s figure of $17,013/student for public schools—or 75% more than private schools.

Incidentally, 75% isn’t far from the DOE’s estimate of a 56–68% cost premium for public schools in the 1991–92 school year.

Beyond that gut-level check, Just Facts corresponded with federal agencies, analyzed academic publications, and tested its methodology by using it to calculate total expenditures for private schools in the same 1991–92 school year that the DOE examined. This yielded a figure of $16.2 billion, or 10–16% lower than the DOE’s estimate of $18.0 to $19.4 billion.

The 10–16% differential accords with the following statement from the DOE’s working paper: “We would be surprised if improved data changed our overall estimate of total expenditures on private education by more than perhaps 10 or 15%.”

Some of the stated shortcomings of the DOE paper’s methodology are as follows:

  • “The main area of concern in the data for Catholic elementary and secondary schools is the response rate: each had a response rate far below 100%. (The response rate for the elementary survey was just above 50%, and for the secondary survey it was about 57%.)”
  • “In addition, our use of region as a proxy for geographic variation may be somewhat crude.”
  • “The principal caveat that needs to be attached to our estimates is that we are uncertain about the specific expenditures school officials included in their responses to the survey items we relied on in our analysis.”
  • “Nor do we know whether most schools responded to the survey items on the basis of a formal school budget or on the basis of less formal materials.”

Students with Disabilities

Per-pupil spending on students with disabilities is roughly 1.9 times that of typical students. Because a disproportionate share of students with disabilities are enrolled in regular public schools, this increases public school spending relative to private schools.

In 2019–20, students with disabilities comprised 1% of students in regular private schools and 14% of students in regular public schools. After adjusting for this difference, the 75% cost premium for public schools declines to 58%.

Unmeasured Costs

The cost premium for public schools is likely greater than 58% because the DOE’s data on public school spending doesn’t account for certain expenses. These include:

  • state government spending on administration.
  • the unfunded liabilities of pensions for government employees.
  • the costs of post-employment non-pension benefits (like health insurance) for government employees.

Such costs are common in public schools and rare in private ones.

The State of Public Education

The performance of schools has major consequences for the well-being of children, as well as the fabric of the nation. The father of the U.S. public education system, Horace Mann, was profoundly aware of these stakes but failed to foresee how his vision would unfold. In 1841, he declared that public schools were “the greatest discovery ever made by man,” and if they were “worked with the efficiency” of which they were capable:

nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.

Reality has played out very differently than Mann predicted. Even though inflation-adjusted spending per public school student has risen by about 43 times since 1885, public schools are now spending an average of $343,663 per classroom per year:

  • only 37% of U.S. residents aged 16 and older can correctly answer a question that requires basic logic, addition, and division.
  • only 22% of the college-bound high school students who take the ACT exam meet its college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math, and science).
  • two-thirds to three-quarters of all young adults in the U.S. are unqualified for military service because of poor physical fitness, weak educational skills, illegal drug use, medical conditions, or criminal records.
  • the drug overdose death rate has quintupled since 2000, and if it remains at the current level, one in every 40 people in the U.S. will ultimately die of a drug overdose.
  • 15-year-old U.S. students rank 31st among 37 developed nations in math, even though the U.S. spends an average of 38% more per K-12 student than other developed nations.

Public schools cannot be logically blamed for the entirety of this ruin because many other factors may be involved. However, public schools play a role—and often a major one—in all of these outcomes. Hence, there is clearly room for improvement.

Competition & School Choice

One of the most effective and time-tested ways to improve products and services is competition. Explaining why this is so, the textbook Economics: Private and Public Choice states:

Competition is a disciplining force for both buyers and sellers. In a competitive environment, producers must provide goods at a low cost and serve the interests of consumers; if they don’t, other suppliers will. … This process leads to improved products and production methods and directs resources toward projects that create more value. It is a powerful stimulus for economic progress.

In accord with that principle, numerous academic papers provide evidence of the benefits of competition in wide-ranging industries.

Likewise, the academic serial work Handbook of Research on School Choice states:

Much of the debate over school choice is based on the premise that there is a public monopoly over the provision of schooling and that schools are inefficient, in part, because of the absence of competition. If families could be treated as consumers and had the right to freely choose which kind of education they would prefer for their children, choice advocates assert that both government and non-government schools would improve….

Based on anecdotes, some people claim that competition doesn’t work in the sphere of education, but comprehensive facts like the following show that it does:

  • At least 22 high-quality studies have been performed on the academic outcomes of students who remain in public schools that are subject to school choice programs. All but one found neutral-to-positive results, and none found negative results.
  • A gold-standard experimental study published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2011 found that high-risk male youth who won a school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina “commit about 50% less crime across several different outcome measures and scalings of crime by severity.”
  • Among 23 experimental (or quasi-experimental) studies that have been conducted on the academic outcomes of students who experience school choice:
    • 13 found statistically significant positive effects.
    • 6 found no statistically significant effects.
    • 3 found statistically significant negative effects.

The Money Drainage Myth

While ignoring all evidence on the benefits of school choice, teachers unions and politicians like Bernie Sanders argue that school choice harms public schools by draining funds from them. The polar opposite is true.

Private school choice generally increases public school funding per student, which is the primary measure of education funding. As explained by Stephen Cornman, a statistician with the DOE’s National Center for Education Statistics, per-pupil spending is “the gold standard in school finance.”

That’s why a school with only 1,000 students would be better funded than a school with 2,000 students if they both received the same total funding. It’s the funding per student that matters, not the funding per school.

Private school choice boosts per-pupil funding in public schools because the public schools no longer educate the students who go to private schools—which spend much less per student than public schools. This leaves additional funding for the students who remain in public schools.

For each non-disabled public school student who moves to a private school, the cost to educate her declines from an average of about $16,000/year to $10,000. This leaves an extra $6,000 in funds for the public school to spend on the remaining students. The savings can be even greater if the law caps the amount of money for private schools to less than $10,000.

What about the costs of students who are already enrolled in private schools? School choice initiatives are typically designed to help children whose parents can’t afford private school. Thus, school choice laws often target benefits to such families and limit benefits for richer households. Even though some of the benefits go to students who are already in private schools, the net result has been that most school choice programs save money. This can be used to increase funding per student in public schools.

Certain school costs (like building maintenance) are fixed in the short term. Thus, the savings of educating fewer students occurs in steps. This means that school choice can temporarily decrease the funding per student in some public schools, but this is brief and slight because only 8% of public school spending is for operations and maintenance.

Tax & Debt Implications

Instead of increasing per-student funding for public schools, the money saved through school choice could be used to reduce taxes or pay down government debt.

In 2021, federal, state, and local governments spent $745 billion on K–12 education, costing every household in the U.S. an average of $5,764. Over the average U.S. lifespan of 76 years, this amounts to $438,000 per household.

Because the average cost of educating children in public schools is now 58% greater than in private schools, taxes, and debt could be significantly reduced by allowing parents to put their children in schools that cost less and provide better education.

Conclusion

Compared to private schools, public schools are costly and ineffective. An array of facts indicates that this situation—which poses a dire threat to the entire nation—can be improved by competition from school choice.

Although choice could help students, parents, and taxpayers, it would harm teachers’ unions by depriving them of dues and power. This is because private schools are less likely to have unions than public ones.

In turn, this financially harms Democratic politicians, political action committees, and related organizations, which have received more than $230 million in reported donations from the two largest teachers’ unions since 1990. Unions also give many unreported donations to Democratic Party causes.

The National Education Association has sent an open letter to Democrats stating that “opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA,” and the 2020 Democratic Party Platform opposes private school choice. Nevertheless, public school teachers are more likely to place their own children in private schools than other parents, and leading Democrats like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren personally attended and/or sent their own children to private schools.

*****

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Whose Children Are They? thumbnail

Whose Children Are They?

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By Bruce Bialosky

When I was growing up there was no question who was in charge of me.  It was my parents.  I was blessed with going to one of the finest public school systems at the time — Shaker Heights, Ohio.  It was clear the schools were responsible for educating me to read, write, learn mathematics and science, and teach me about history, particularly American history. The responsibility ended there. Have things ever changed?

I saw a transition when my own children attended school. The Beautiful Wife and I chose to send them to a Jewish school system. We knew of the degradation of the public school systems (in the ‘90s) and wanted our children to have our Jewish values reinforced during the long school days they experienced.  When they were in elementary school the only indoctrination they were subject to was spelling correctly and multiplication tables.

Challenges began by the time they got to high school. There was a required health course that was a poorly disguised sex education course.  Reviewing the curriculum, I questioned some of the materials and was told by the school headmaster it was a required course by the state of California for my children to graduate.  Otherwise, tough luck sir.

The following year was dedicated to teaching the elements of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I had seen the movie and found it to be a load of malarkey. There were predictions in the movie passed off as being truths about the future which have subsequently turned out to be incorrect.

For a meeting with the principal and science department head, I arrived with a stack of counter-evidence to what was proposed in the movie. I started by holding up my well-worn copy of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.  I spoke of how when I was my kids’ age the book was spoken of as gospel. Virtually everything in the book turned out to be hogwash.  In fact, even the Left-leaning Wikipedia states, “Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist best known for his pessimistic and inaccurate predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources.” I told them Al Gore’s movie would end up being thought of in the same manner. It had no scientific basis. Unfortunately, they went on with their misguided celebration of the movie.

The challenges we faced 17 years ago are insignificant compared to what is being spread in the public school systems today in coordination with the two national teachers’ unions propagandists.  I don’t know what I would do today if I were faced with the degradation of the school systems in my area.  I am sure I would pull up stakes and relocate to an area where my children were not being indoctrinated. Alternatively, they would be home-schooled.

That is exactly what I see happening.  Every group that ever wanted to change society has drafted the children into their movement and trained them in their thinking. Lenin did it. Stalin did it. Mao did it. You can rest assured that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il did it and Kim Jong Un is continuing in their footsteps. We know Palestinian children are being indoctrinated to hate and want to kill Jews. 

You can fight back.  My friend, Barak Lurie, recently wrote a book, Keeping The Kids All Right, a handy guide on how to protect your kids from indoctrination.

Many people are pessimistic because the teachers’ unions have such a death grip on the educational system.  It would be moderately acceptable except for the epic failures of educating the kids in the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. That is why they call for abolishing standardized tests — to hide their malfeasances. 

Recent wins by parents wanting traditional education along with parental control in the schools have given me reason to be optimistic. Parents who for a long time trusted that their school boards and schools were doing the right thing have become activists. Many parents are running for school board positions instead of allowing the Education Cartel to control their schools. 

The bigger move is taking back control and returning it to the hands of the parents. As of today, there are ten states with universal or near-universal school choice programs, meaning that all or virtually all students in the state are eligible to participate in a school choice program. That puts parents in charge of choosing their kids’ school instead of being told their children are sentenced to an underperforming indoctrination factory.

These states are Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia.  These programs allow students to use public funds to attend a private school, charter school, or other non-public educational setting. Six more states have legislation to adopt universal school choice.

In the next five years or so we will begin to see the contrast in performance among states.  My money is on the states that provide freedom of choice to parents.  You know where the school funding follows the students as opposed to the performance in New Jersey, New York City, Chicago, and California where children’s futures are sacrificed to the god of unionized teachers.

We used to blindly trust our school systems before teachers’ unions took over.  Those days are gone.  Parents need to be and are once again involved in their children’s education.  They must take back control.  It needs to be done before we have a generation of uneducated, indoctrinated zombies created by inferior schools.

*****

This article was published in  Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

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Congress Headed For Showdown Over Ukraine, Israel Funds As Massie And Greene Say ‘NO’ To All thumbnail

Congress Headed For Showdown Over Ukraine, Israel Funds As Massie And Greene Say ‘NO’ To All

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By Tyler Durden

House Republican opposition to Ukraine funding – a large part of why Kevin McCarthy was ousted by the Freedom Caucus – is solidifying under newly crowned Speaker Mike Johnson, who hand-delivered a report to President Biden with a list of demands.

In particular, the list – written by Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA), informs Biden that Congress won’t authorize any additional funds for Ukraine unless the administration answers a dozen questions about the path forward. Chief among them – how Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy plan to win the war against Russia, and how long it might take.

“Failure to ask these questions, and a continued willingness by Congress to enable this carte blanche mentality to date, is, in my opinion, a dereliction of duty and a recipe for disaster that will enable a Ukrainian defeat and enhance Chinese aggression,” said Garcia.

Johnson, meanwhile, has made clear that House Republicans won’t bundle Ukraine aid and money for Israel’s conflict with Hamas, as Biden wants.

On Sunday, Johnson told “Sunday Morning Futures” that Israel aid must be separated because it’s a more “pressing and urgent need” that the House will act on this week.

“There are lots of things going on around the world that we have to address, and we will,” he said, adding “But now what’s happening in Israel takes the immediate attention, and we’ve got to separate that and get it through.”

What about no on Israel too?

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Sunday posted on X that she won’t support any more foreign aid, including support to Israel, because of the national debt…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Zero Hedge.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore

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Decolonization from Theory to Practice thumbnail

Decolonization from Theory to Practice

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By Phillip W. Magness

Since October 7th, 2023, we have seen that ideas have consequences in the real world. Phillip Magness is an economic historian who specializes in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains an active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought.

He joins Kate Wand on Liberty Curious to discuss his recent work on Critical Race Theory (CRT), its proliferation in academia and the mainstream, and its connection to the far left’s response to Hamas’ massacre of Israeli citizens. Phil Magness is a Senior Research Faculty and F.A. Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Read more of Phil’s work at philmagness.com
Phil’s Faculty profile at AIER.org
Enjoy the full catalog of AIER Podcasts
Phil’s Article on Critical Race Theory in the Data

Use these timestamps to navigate the interview content:
0:00 – Intro
1:35 – CRT in a nutshell
3:05 – CRT academics’ reactions to Oct 7
10:24 – Media spin
13:08 – Who is colonizing who?
17:07 – What is decolonization?
19:15 – The dangers of CRT in the real world
20:39 – The proliferation of CRT in academia
26:46 – Why are these ideas so seductive?
30:15 – Promises
33:07 – Silver linings?
37:20 – Last Thoughts

*****

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

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Secretary Of State’s Office Lacks Processes To Clean Voter Rolls Of Over 78K Noncitizens, Nonresidents thumbnail

Secretary Of State’s Office Lacks Processes To Clean Voter Rolls Of Over 78K Noncitizens, Nonresidents

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By Corinne Murdock

The secretary of state’s office lacks the processes in place to remove about 78,000 potential noncitizens and nonresidents from its voter rolls.

In its last two quarterly reports issued to the state legislature in May and August, respectively, the department reported that it had received reports of but not acted on over 78,200 potentially invalid voters. The secretary of state’s office didn’t respond to our inquiry as to whether they have since put in place any processes to remove those potentially invalid voters from the voter rolls.

Through the beginning of August, the secretary of state received reports of over 53,200 persons reported to have been issued a driver’s license or equivalent of an Arizona nonoperating ID license in another state; over 1,300 persons who admitted to not being a citizen on a jury questionnaire; and over 23,600 persons who admitted to not being a resident of a county on a jury questionnaire. In those cases, the secretary of state’s office disclosed that a process for sending notices, placing voter registrations on inactive status, or canceling voter registrations was “in development.”

These reports were included as exhibits in a Monday filing by Attorney General Kris Mayes in the case Mi Familia Vota v. Adrian Fontes, a case seeking to nullify state election integrity laws requiring stricter standards for voter proof of citizenship and voter roll cleanups.

These reports were previously believed to have not been submitted to the legislature, per previous reporters’ accounts of an inability to obtain the records. According to the exhibits, the two reports were submitted to Sen. President Warren Petersen (R-AZ-14) and House Speaker Ben Toma (R-AZ-27).

Last month, the Democratic Party-backed activist groups secured a partial win in a ruling from Arizona District Court Judge Susan Bolton. The judge determined that the proof of citizenship requirement set forth by the two laws in question, HB 2492 and HB 2243, posed too great a burden on voters.

Several questions remain before the Arizona District Court in the case.

One concerns whether HB 2492’s requirement that voters provide their place of birth, referred to as the birthplace requirement, violates 52 U.S.C. § 10101(a)(2)(B), referred to as the materiality provision.

“No person acting under color of law shall – deny the right of any individual to vote in any election because of an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting, if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote in such election,” states the federal statute.

Last week, the Biden administration issued a brief declaring that birthplace wasn’t material to determining voter eligibility. Kristen Clarke, Civil Rights Division assistant attorney general, and Gary Restaino, Arizona District attorney, argued that certain individuals born in the U.S. can be noncitizens such as those with diplomat parents, those who later renounce their citizenship, and those born outside the country to U.S. citizen parents.

Another question concerns whether the voter list maintenance programs set forth by HB 2492 and HB 2243 violate 52 U.S.C. § 10101(a)(2)(A), referred to as the discrimination provision, or violate the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

“No person acting under color of law shall – in determining whether any individual is qualified under State law or laws to vote in any election, apply any standard, practice, or procedure different from the standards, practices, or procedures applied under such law or laws to other individuals within the same county, parish, or similar political subdivision who have been found by State officials to be qualified to vote,” states the federal statute.

Another concerns whether the NVRA requirement that states accept and use the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) federal voter registration form preempts HB 2243’s voter list maintenance program.

The case is scheduled to go to trial on Nov. 6.

*****

This article was published at AZ Free News and is reproduced with permission.

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