TLDR DIGEST FEB 13-20

HEADLINES

Canada to NYC: Stop Sending Us Migrants, Eh?

Why Russiagate was the media’s Vietnam

The press declared war on Donald Trump. They lost

U.S. State Department Funds a Disinformation Index That Warns Advertisers To Avoid Reason

Reason is listed among the "ten riskiest online news outlets" by a government-funded disinfo tracker.

How Did the Michigan State University Shooter Get a Gun? Blame Progressive Politics

Inflation Numbers Mock Optimists as Price Pressures Re-Emerge

The pace of price increases, running at levels not seen in 40 years, exceeded analysts’ estimates and is far above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent annual inflation target.

U.S. Could Permit the Release of Billions in Frozen Funds to Iran as Part of Prisoner Swap

Joe Biden Is the Brezhnev of DEI

Why U.S. teens aren't getting their driver's licenses: Are they avoiding adult responsibilities?

QUOTES

“…it seems like progressive politics played a part in McRae obtaining the firearm in this shooting. In 2019, he was pinched on some gun charges that a soft-on-crime prosecutor dropped. To make matters worse, this prosecuting attorney had a policy not to push too hard on gun charges where those involved were people of color. Oh, and of course, this attorney had ties to George Soros. If McRae had been charged as any other person caught illegally carrying a concealed firearm without a permit, the shooting at MSU might not have happened.”

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"Social justice is word magic. …you can’t really have a definition of it, at least not one that limits the ambition of social justice activists, because the whole point is that social justice activists get to decide on the fly what is or isn’t socially just.  Social justice, as Friedrich Hayek argued brilliantly and at great length, is almost the opposite of actual justice. “[O]nly situations that have been created by human will can be called just or unjust. ... Social justice,” Hayek wrote, “does not belong to the category of effort but that of nonsense, like the term ‘a moral stone.’”

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“The exodus is real: California lost nearly 350,000 residents in 2022, while New York lost about 300,000 and Illinois saw more than 140,000 go elsewhere, per Census numbers. Other states, including New Jersey (-64,231), Massachusetts (-57,292) and Pennsylvania (-39,957), also saw large numbers of residents say goodbye.  But other states, such as Florida and Texas, saw large gains in population, with Florida adding an eye-popping 444,484 residents and Texas adding 470,708. Other population winners include North Carolina (99,796 residents added), South Carolina (+84,030), Tennessee (+81,646) and Georgia (+81,406).”

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“…the explanation that best explains her behavior is that letting go of her theory of the Revolution would undermine the central narrative goal of the 1619 Project, which is to rewrite the history of the American Founding so as to make it not a flawed thing but an affirmatively bad thing. If your ideological project demands that the Founding be bad from the outset, you can never admit that it was driven by anything but the worst possible motive. Certainly, Hannah-Jones has acted for the past three and a half years as if preserving that narrative is more important than the credibility of all the rest of the 1619 Project or of the New York Times as an institution. And nobody around her has deterred her from that course.”

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“So public health officials, federal agencies, and Columbia University professors are "unreliable" now that Senator Paul is highlighting their statements and findings that suggest tinkering around with viruses can have negative consequences. As for being "harmful," it's abundantly clear that the only harm done by Senator Paul's column is to the narrative Dr. Fauci tried to establish — along with the Big Tech overlords who will stop at nothing to protect him as Science itself.”

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“…in terms of how we tell the story of Black America, the board did the right thing, whether because of DeSantis’s threat or for more high-minded reasons. The take that I saw in the course’s original draft depicted the history of Black America over the past several decades as an unbroken stream of left protest against a seemingly unchanging racist hegemon. …But Black history has been ever so much more than protest and professional pessimism; note how hard it is to imagine any other group of people whose history is written with this flavor so dominant.  This is not education but advocacy.”

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“It was once America’s outlet for political and cultural rebellion, but now rock and roll has taken a disturbing new direction, endorsing censorship, Covid mandates, and, worst of all, predictability.”

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“Vanderbilt University’s education school has apologized after sending a condolence message to staff and students regarding a recent shooting at Michigan State University that was drafted by ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chat bot.”

TLDR DIGEST FEB 6-13

HEADLINES

Arizona hospital on brink of collapse after spending $20 million on migrant care: 'Nobody has a solution'

Iranian smuggled in car trunk shows security threat from our open border

Biden Regime Quietly Frees One of 9/11 Terrorist Planners from Gitmo as the Whole Country Watches the Chinese Spy Balloon

The Best Advice Against Antisemitism — From an Antisemite

‘You People’ Furthers ‘Black-ish’ Creator’s Obnoxious Racial Agenda

College Doesn’t Need to Take Four Years

For many students, the standard bachelor’s degree program has become a costly straitjacket.

BBC Radio issues apology after trans gamer rails against J.K. Rowling for 'transphobia': 'We fell short here'

State Leaders Ratchet Up Efforts To Rein In Campus Diversity Initiatives

Since the Florida governor started his efforts to curtail so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, lawmakers in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas have joined the fray.

Taking on ‘Big Tech’ Emerges as the One Issue With Bipartisan Consensus in New Congress

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QUOTES

“…take a hypothetical. Say you’re a member of the American political establishment after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. You’re staring at four years as part of a government-in-exile and need a new message to solve your belief problem. What’s your answer? My hypothesis is such people never bothered to find one. Instead, they declared a state of emergency.  What emergency? Doesn’t matter. Russian interference was a good startup disaster, but you can keep changing them. The important thing is the pattern. One, declare a crisis. Two, spread panic. Three, take emergency measures. If you do this over and over, you end up with permanent crisis, permanent panic, permanent emergency rule. So long as new crises keep evoking unconscious fear and anxiety, the legitimacy of the political establishment is continuously justified.”

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"Today, the U.S. media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism…Americans suspect that inaccuracies in reporting are purposeful, with 52 percent believing that reporters misrepresent the facts, and 28 percent believing reporters make them up entirely…”

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“The most contemptuous reaction to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade is coming from, shockingly, a United States district  judge. The judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, has ordered the government to give an opinion on whether by becoming pregnant a woman has become enslaved — and therefore whether abortion must be allowed under the 13th Amendment that declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall exist in America.  Opening that line of questioning in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization strikes us as contemptuous not only of the Supreme Court, which just ruled that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution. It’s also contemptuous of African Americans who endured the travails of chattel slavery. She is making of the 13th Amendment, one of the most important laws ever passed, a kind of constitutional joke in service of abortion rights.”

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“"People are terrified, especially speaking from my experience of talking to other NCAA swimmers specifically. Lia Thomas’s teammates even. They are told their school has made their stance for them. They are told if they feel uncomfortable seeing male genitalia in the locker room, they should seek counseling resources. They're told they will never get into grad school if they speak out," Gaines said.”

TLDR DIGEST JAN 30-FEB 6

HEADLINES

FEMINIST CEO WANTS MEN TO STOP TALKING ABOUT SPORTS AT WORK

Transgender woman convicted of 2 rapes will be sent to men's prison in Scotland

Finland debuted the world’s first national trans ice skater and it went exactly like you’d expect

College Board Removes CRT Themes from AP African-American Studies Course after DeSantis Pushback

White House Failed to Disclose FBI Search of Biden Think Tank, Raising Questions about ‘Transparency’ Claims

National Archives Says It Was 'Ordered' to Keep Biden's Classified Documents Hidden From Public

House Oversight Committee Demands John Kerry Turn Over CCP Climate-Negotiation Documents

It's Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives

Classified-Documents Probe Highlights Biden Family’s Deep Ties to Penn

Long before the Penn Biden Center, the family and the Ivy League school cultivated a close relationship that benefited both sides

Joe Biden’s Big Oil Profits

Exxon’s shareholders can thank the President for his limits on U.S. fossil-fuel production

To vilify our founders, Hulu’s ‘1619’ ignores what actually sparked the American Revolution

Monica Lewinsky took Bill Clinton’s eye off bin Laden, leading to 9/11: ex-aide

Twitter Files: Employees Knew the Media's Favorite Russian Bots List Was Fake

Of course New Yorkers are furious at the red carpet rolled out for the migrant wave

Who Was Really Behind the Jerusalem Terror Attack

This isn’t random terrorism, it’s carefully calculated terrorism.

Gavin Newsom's Wife Rakes in Cash Charging California Public Schools To Screen Her Woke Movies

Meet the Green Energy Group Behind the Study That's Driving Calls To Ban Gas Stoves

Rocky Mountain Institute partnered with China to implement 'economy-wide transformation' away from oil and gas

Anarchy, American-Style

The Left runs Oceania, and we work for their various bureaus

SUNY needs its own Ron DeSantis as a savior from woke insanity

Al Gore and the End of Climate Policy

He gave us only climate pork and propaganda, but it’s OK because the science is looking up

QUOTES

“Professor Steven Pinker, hailed as a free-thinking intellectual, slammed efforts by Chris Rufo and others to stop woke indoctrination in schools[:] “Stoking the culture wars, rallying the Trumpist base, and using the power of the state to defeat bad ideas is not the road back to sanity”…Rufo responded Pinker saying he and others like him have "presided over the decades-long collapse" of academia.   "Boomers like Steven Pinker presided over the decades-long collapse of standards in academia. Now they want to lecture sanctimoniously about ‘how not to fix academia,’" Rufo tweeted. "Sorry, buddy, we're not going to listen to people who can't even open their comments. We're in charge now.””

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“…the idea that policing—and every police department today—is a “direct descendant” of slave patrols or the Fugitive Slave Act is ahistorical nonsense no dumber than saying policing was invented to catch escaped Hebrew slaves in ancient Egypt. … Rep. Val Demmings, a black woman, was the chief of police in Orlando before she went to Congress. Was she just good at hiding her racism? Do we really believe that the San Francisco Police Department (established in 1849), run by a black man, is compelled to compound the legacy of slavery despite all of his training and beliefs, never mind the political culture of San Francisco? How about the black female Memphis police chief?”

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“…Biden … gave the impression that he never took classified materials home with him. He left them in unsecured locations, and we still don’t know who glanced at them or had access to the multiple locations where they were improperly stored. Trump had all the files at Mar-a-Lago under Secret Service protection and handled by staffers with the proper security clearances…The FBI raided Trump but is dragging their feet with Biden, creating a chaotic chain of custody concerning the re-possessed files grandpa left out in the open. Also, the fact that the FBI doesn’t know where the documents are should at least spark a fire at the DOJ to blitzkrieg the effort to recover as much as possible on a speedy timeline, right? They don’t care because Biden is a Democrat, which isn’t a shocking development from a corrupt agency that's become the Left’s Gestapo force.”

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“Police don't stop people at random. They stop people whom they believe to be breaking the law. … George Floyd was a fentanyl addict (which, of course, contributed in no way to his death) who'd just passed a counterfeit $20 bill -- not to mention the armed home invasion robbery he'd committed back in Texas; Michael Brown had just knocked over a convenience store and gratuitously roughed up the small Asian owner on his way out; Freddie Gray was a heroin dealer in possession of an illegal switchblade; Breonna Taylor was the bag woman for a fentanyl dealer; Daunte Wright was driving with an expired registration and had a warrant for his arrest stemming from his choking a woman during an attempted armed robbery.  For any meaningful comparison of civilians killed by cops, the denominator needs to be "percentage of contacts with the police.””

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“When progressives can’t pass their agenda through the front door in Congress, they sneak it through a regulatory back window. That’s what the Biden Administration is doing with gas stoves, as the Energy Department this week proposed new rules that amount to a gradual de facto ban.”

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“Like it or not, the hijab has become the symbol of oppression by the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially its oppression of women. It would be particularly tone-deaf to celebrate that symbol in 2023 while the Iranian government is arresting and killing women who are protesting the mandatory hijab and the men who impose it on them…The progressives who celebrate World Hijab Day also call themselves feminists, but they are really cultural relativists. They express their low expectations for non-Western cultures by excusing purdah (forced female seclusion) and other forms of misogyny as "just their way." They signal virtue by veiling themselves for a day, but then take off their Gucci scarves with impunity, unlike real women in Iran and Afghanistan and even some in the West. Instead of celebrating World Hijab Day this year, we should celebrate its opposite, or as close as we can get to its opposite, something called amameh parani or "turban throwing" (or "tipping"). This phenomenon began in Iran late in 2022 as protesters grew more confident and their performative acts of rebellion against the ruling clerics grew bolder. Easily identified by their robes and white or black turbans, the "pious" members of Iran's valeyat-e-faqih (guardianship of jurists) are the issuers of fatwas, condemners of freedom, killers of fun. The act of tipping off, or grabbing and throwing, their amameh (the Shia turban) signifies both defiance and profound disrespect. It is in some ways comparable to an Arab using his shoes to beat a foe, as the revelers in Baghdad did to a statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, and an Iraqi journalist attempted to do to George W. Bush on Dec. 14, 2008.”

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“California Democrats have used the $4 billion in annual cap-and-trade auction revenue to subsidize electric vehicles and solar panels for the wealthy. The dirty little secret that California and Ms. Hochul won’t share with voters is that cap and trade is a regressive tax that punishes low- and middle-income earners.”

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