HEADLINES
In a Matter of Weeks, the Year 2023 Has Been One of the Worst for American Journalism
NYPD Cops Are Fleeing At Record Rates Due to Ravaging Crime
DeSantis’ Take on AP African American Studies Was Principled. The Media’s Response Was Not
The Biden White House Drove the Saudis into China’s Arms
Jewish Parents Sue California over Law Barring Religious Schools from Access to Public Disability Funding
DeSantis Dupes Opponents into Admitting Children Are Being Exposed to Pornographic Books
Biden Claims It’s ‘Close To Sinful’ For States To Stand Between Kids And Trans-Activist Doctors
Biden: Hey, Maybe We Should Start Detaining Migrant Families Again
Canadian Government Admits Money Sent to Afghanistan Will Help Taliban, Islamists Rejoice
Hollywood Wakes Up: Gratitude Replaces Wokeism at This Year’s Oscars
Is Hollywood finally listening?
D.C. Citizens Immediately Challenge New Law Allowing Non-Citizens to Vote in Local Elections
NPR puff piece on Atlanta leftist gunman revealed to be written by Antifa supporter
Antifa "isn't a terrorist organization," because they act "mostly in self-defense and in the defense of others," NPR's Kaity Radde wrote
‘They’ve Ignored Us’: Female Powerlifters Sound Alarm on Male Takeover after Trans Court Ruling
DeSantis Pulls Hyatt Regency’s Liquor License following Drag Show with Children Present
Saudi–Iranian Deal Proves Why the U.S. Can’t Ignore the Middle East
If we don’t exercise influence in the region, those hostile to our interests will
All-Women Liberal Arts College Votes On Non-Binding Referendum To Allow Trans, Non-Binary Individuals To Apply
Senator Mark Kelly Called For Social Media Censorship To Prevent Bank Runs
Democrats are demanding ever-more censorship in a widening social media panic
Oklahoma man gets early release, commits triple homicide, cuts woman's heart out
Cuba Arrests a 24-Year-Old YouTuber for Describing Daily Life on the Communist Island
Hildina Nuñez Diaz is now confined to her home, bereft of her equipment for broadcasting
As China's Blue-Water Navy Continues Massive Expansion, US Navy Secretary Says Climate Is His 'Top Priority'
CNN correspondent reporting on San Francisco street crime falls victim to car break-in
Beauty queen who fled Iraq War now proud American battling Dem wokeness
Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed
Right on Schedule, the Media Decide DeSantis Is ‘Worse’ Than Trump
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta turned blind eye to sex trafficking evidence, suit says
Nebraska Democrat halts legislature over trans bill she calls ‘genocide’
Hunter Biden used FBI mole named ‘One-Eye’ to tip him off to China probes: tipster
Military Stonewalls Investigation Into Controversial Diversity Official Leading K-12 Schools
‘Crazy’ UFO-believing Pentagon bosses missed spy craft for years
TikTok CEO’s ‘disaster’ testimony will increase calls for US ban, analysts say
New York nears deal to ban gas stoves in new homes
The Supreme Court Nominee Who Would Abolish Mother’s Day
How I hid Ruth Bader Ginsburg's incendiary positions
Why Does Charles and Camilla’s Coronation Already Feel Like a Bust?
It appears that Queen Elizabeth’s fans just aren’t that into Charles and Camilla
QUOTES
“Three days before Silicon Valley Bank’s Friday failure, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen cautioned that climate change puts the banking industry at risk. … Yellen has been an outspoken activist for climate change, women’s rights and diversity, including appointing Treasury’s first-ever racial-equity counselor. Apparently the hordes of bureaucrats working under her are also too busy with diversity, equity and inclusion seminars to prevent banks from failing.”
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“Race and sexual identity are as important to the Democratic Party as religion is to Republicans…Professors and administrators may not be conscious propagandists for the Democrats. But they have surely read enough Marx to know that ideology tends to be derivative of more basic interests…Until colleges have more conservatives and Republicans, they will only have more cancellations.”
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“For the longest time, Republicans asked themselves, more or less: “How do we stop the insanity?” The question DeSantis is asking is different: “How do we root out the insanity and replace it with something better?”… DeSantis is trying to show that not only can this momentous problem be addressed, but that rollback is an option. To wit, he’s not seeking to limit the damage that DEI programs have on campus. He wants to extricate them entirely. … On education, an absolutely crucial front in the culture war, DeSantis is not seeking to play defense or lose slowly.”
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“Fairfax County, the largest public school board in Virginia, is eliminating a multiple choice test question from a Grade 12 Advanced Placement (AP) Government assessment asking students to identify which ethnicity and gender attributes are “an accurate comparison of liberals versus conservatives.” … Test takers were asked to consult a grid featuring four options of liberal and conservative combinations to choose from, including pairings of “Middle age, urban lesbian” and “Southern male migrant laborer.””
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“No one — and I mean no one — is more sick of Jews in Hollywood than are Orthodox Jews and Jewish conservatives in general. The Hollywood Jews mock and denigrate Jews and Judaism in their movies and TV shows as only Jews would dare. They bear leftist and globalist guilt for being affiliated, however tenuously, with an identifiable non-globalist, particularist community: Jews. They are stuck. They want so much to be accepted as Blacks and as BIPOC and as any and all other intersectionalist groups who are associated with “The Culture,” but the intersectionalists don’t want them. … The progressives and the DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — crowd spit them out as “Whites,” and White Supremacists spit them out as Jews. And these bewildered and abysmally ignorant Jews do not know where they fit. Because they don’t fit. Their entire leftist universe has collapsed on them, now keeping their kids out of the colleges they attended to make DEI room for the less qualified.”
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“[Silicon Valley Bank] calculated (correctly) that their politically influential industry was too big to fail and would be bailed out if anything went wrong, so they could reap the rewards while things were going well and then socialize the losses later without pre-paying for insurance. While the specific economic causes are different, the psychology at work here seems reminiscent of the collapse earlier this year of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX and its impact on people who used the exchange as a custodian for their crypto investments, even though the whole point of cryptocurrency is supposed to be its independence from exposure to institutional failures.”
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“‘Safety’ in the language of woke culture doesn’t mean what you think it means…Most of us think of safety in physical terms, right? But I’m sure these board members aren’t actually concerned that ACU students are going to go physically attack anyone in woke culture…‘Safety’ usually refers to psychological safety from people who hold so-called ‘oppressive’ beliefs. And of course, oppressive beliefs are those that culture thinks are keeping oppressed groups oppressed. So in this case, a biblical view of sexuality is considered harmful and oppressive to those in the LGBTQ community because the biblical view does not morally affirm all sexual identities and choices. What I think is hard for most of us to grasp is that you don’t actually have to say or do anything with respect to your beliefs for woke culture to consider you unsafe as a person.”
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“Europeans claim they want to uphold human rights, but their foot-dragging and retreat from confronting Iran prove otherwise. The internal upheaval playing out in Iranian cities could be aided by Western labor unions, which could provide strike funds to the Iranians. Such a step could produce results similar to American labor unions' joining with the Polish Solidarity Trade Union strikers in the 1980s. The most meaningful way for Western leaders to express "democracy promotion in Iran" is to show solidarity with the people risking their lives protesting across the country and proclaim their support for "a post-Islamic Republic of Iran government.””
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“Massive failure is all our foreign policy elite knows. Name one of its successes since 1993. Don’t say the Abraham Accords – that was a huge success and had nothing to do with our foreign policy establishment. It was Trump outsiders who did it. The foreign policy establishment brought us Vietnam and Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It brought us debt, blood, and humiliation…Ron DeSantis – who served in Iraq and saw the failure firsthand – has rejected the Beltway consensus. He’s a bit ahead of most of America now, but after another year and a half of this madness he and the American people will be in synch. If he wins the nomination, he will be an anti-war Republican against a pro-war establishment Democrat.”
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“…it's hard to make Donald Trump look sympathetic. Congratulations to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for finding a way to do it…Perhaps this is their way of interfering in the Republican primary, to get Trump re-nominated because they think they can beat him. Or maybe they're just dumber than anyone thought. Either way, they were never sincere in their anger about "Lock her up." They were just throwing their tantrums over that for show. As with everything else they say.”
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“Biden's Energy Department is coming not only for your gas stove. Your fridge and your washer are also in its sights. The administration claimed its new refrigerator and washer-dryer standards would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 233 million metric tons over 30 years. That amounts to 0.02%, two hundredths, of world emissions. In exchange for that virtually nonexistent environmental benefit, consumers will pay upfront costs of $7.58 billion to buy more expensive washers and $6.9 billion for more expensive refrigerators….No wonder Biden's administration feels it must force people to buy products they don’t want.”
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“Many progressives embraced Covid-era abnormality as a catalyst for revolutionary social change. They’re having a hard time letting go now…During Donald Trump’s presidency, his critics routinely condemned his personal excesses and those of his administration by insisting that the condition the nation found itself in was “not normal.” Many of those same figures pivoted during the pandemic to embracing abnormality because it served as a catalyst for revolutionary societal change. And their co-partisans seem to have developed some psychological resistance to post-pandemic normalcy as a result.”
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“Why did the braintrust of a social movement dedicated to virtuous impact apparently fail to heed repeated warnings about one of their own, while continuing to promote him publicly as a force for good? For a group of philosophers who had spent their lives contemplating moral tradeoffs and weighing existential risks, the warnings about Bankman-Fried may have presented a choice between embracing a big donor with questionable ethics or foregoing millions of dollars they believed could boost their nascent movement to help save the future of humanity. In a span of less than nine months in 2022, Bankman-Fried’s FTX Future Fund—helmed by Beckstead—gave more than $160 million to effective altruist causes, including more than $33 million to organizations connected to MacAskill. “If [Bankman-Fried] wasn’t super wealthy, nobody would have given him another chance,” says one person who worked closely with MacAskill at an EA organization. “It’s greed for access to a bunch of money, but with a philosopher twist.””
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“…Yes, the same people who spent four years trying to convince you that Trump posed a unique, once-in-a-lifetime threat to the republic are trying now to convince you that an even greater threat to the republic is now upon us. Just ignore the part where they do this bit every four years. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that Mitt Romney, the sweetest, most wholesome presidential candidate you ever saw, was out there being accused of manslaughtering a woman diagnosed with cancer.”
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“The Left’s war against euphemisms that no longer advance their political objectives provides them with a self-soothing way to avoid confronting their own policy failures while indicting the public. Democrats don’t lose political fights. They only lose the “messaging war.” That explains why the Left is so often inclined to shoot the messenger.”
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“Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, is currently home to around 500 Jews, out of a population of over 275 million. But as Indonesians of Jewish ancestry have started to publicly reclaim their heritage over the past two decades, the community is thriving like never before.”
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“Number of the day: 70%. That’s how many white-collar workers are using ChatGPT for mundane office tasks without telling their bosses what they’re up to. According to a new Fishbowl survey, the AI tool has already been used by some 43% of workers, with the chat tool particularly popular among bankers and consultants who’ve tapped the ghost in the machine for writing out bits of code and email copy. Some Wall Street firms, though, aren’t sold on AI, with Bank of America and Goldman Sachs already banning any use of the AI software by employees.”
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“There are a lot of deeply disturbing and unlikeable members of the trans cult. Jazz Jennings is not one of them. He was transitioned by his mother at the tender age of five…While some people are pointing the finger at Jeanette — and it’s understandable why — that’s not where the majority of the fault lies. Jeanette Jennings did profit off the transition of her little boy in many ways, including a hit television show, numerous speaking engagements, and elevation to stardom in the “trans community,” where she is treated like the Virgin Mother of the Christ child. But she is also a victim of a predatory medical industry full of people who lie for billions of dollars.”
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“What happens when the Department of Justice decides that its goal is not justice but protecting the ruling class at all costs? … Think about that. People are still going to demand justice. The desire for justice is an inherent human desire. We are born with it. But if there’s no neutral place to do it, some people will decide they’re going to have to do it themselves. Now, we don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like, but we can say for certain it’s going to be really ugly.”
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“…religion is the left’s cheat code…by imbuing the [transgenderism] subject with religious language, Biden hopes to bypass the need for debate altogether. Through the framework of faith, leftism—and specifically transgenderism—becomes a measurement of morality. Those who agree are without sin. Those who disagree are sinful. Ultimately, the end goal of this false belief is that debate itself is a sign of faithlessness. Throughout history, religion has been manipulated to achieve control. And the goal of that control is to equate disbelief with non-belief—an infidel-like stance that must ultimately be punished. Remember, Biden is not simply saying that his opponents are wrong. He’s saying that they are ungodly. This only makes sense if transgenderism is his religion.”
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“Democratic political operatives believed that TikTok is politically advantageous for them,” [Rubio] said. “And so they kind of want to look tough on China, but they don’t want to crack down on this website, because they’re using it, and they think it benefits them, even though it’s hurting the country.”…Biden [] has rarely discussed the issue ahead of an expected 2024 presidential run, apparently for fear of alienating a key Democratic voting bloc: Generation Z. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said as much in a March interview. “The politician in me thinks you’re gonna literally lose every voter under 35, forever,” she told Bloomberg of the potential risk of banning the app.”
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“For years, SVB and its cronies lobbied for looser risk limits by arguing that its failure wouldn't create "systemic risk" and wouldn't need special intervention by the U.S. government. Yet now the same cronies claim SVB was "systemically important.”…Would Biden have bailed out the uninsured depositors of a no-name oil-and-gas bank in Oklahoma? Almost surely not. They would have made predictable arguments about the greed and recklessness of profiteering oil companies. Don't buy the argument that taxpayers aren't funding this bailout, either. Recall that everyday customers will have to shoulder the burden of this bailout through higher charges as they top up the FDIC. The lesson of the Biden bailout of SVB is clear: Bailouts for me, but not for thee. Kudos to Silicon Valley for winning this edition of cronyism in America.”
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“… knock-on layoffs and lost business at local auto-parts suppliers, restaurants and shops, shows the dark side of the zero-emissions economy the Biden administration is championing with tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies. Even as many communities will be transformed by the federally backed push to produce electric cars, batteries and solar panels, some will get left behind.”
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“…we’re dealing with at least two demographics that are notoriously irresponsible, careless, and barely capable of understanding the long-term consequences of their actions: teenagers and Democratic members of Congress. A huge portion of the TikTok usership is teenagers, and teenagers, despite their frequent protests, are not adults who can make their own decisions in the eyes of the law or the Constitution. At minimum, a ban on users under age 18 is long overdue.”
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"...female workers at Facebook were told how to dress [;] they had to avoid wearing skirts that were deemed too short lest they be “distracting” to others"
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“
Midway through my review of Ginsburg’s record, I ran across a 212-page report on “The Legal Status of Women under Federal Law” that she wrote in 1974 and submitted to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Ginsburg (and her co-author Brendan Feigen Fasteau) undertook to determine whether various provisions of the United States Code “differentiate[] on the basis of sex.” Her report set forth these explosive propositions:
“Replacing ‘Mother’s Day’ and ‘Father’s Day’ with a ‘Parents’ Day’ should be considered, as an observance more consistent with a policy of minimizing traditional sex-based differences in parental roles.” [p. 133]
“Prostitution, as a consensual act between adults, is arguably within the zone of privacy protected by recent constitutional decisions.” [p. 72]
A statutory restriction on political rights of bigamists “is of questionable constitutionality since it appears to encroach impermissibly upon private relationships.” [pp. 190–191]
“Sex-segregated adult or juvenile institutions are obviously separate and in a variety of ways, unequal.... If the grand design of such institutions is to prepare inmates for return to the community as persons equipped to benefit from and contribute to civil society, then perpetuation of single-sex institutions should be rejected….
While the personal privacy principle permits maintenance of separate sleeping and bathing facilities, no other facilities, e.g., work, school, cafeteria, should be maintained for one sex only…. [G]ender should not be a relevant factor in determining institutional assignments [for prisoners].” [p. 75]
“The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, while ostensibly providing ‘separate but equal’ benefits to both sexes, perpetuate stereotyped sex roles to the extent that they carry out congressionally-mandated purposes.” [p. 131]
Her report also recommended that the age of consent for purposes of statutory rape be lowered from 16 to 12. (See pages 69–71 and the specific recommendation regarding 18 U.S.C. § 2032 on page 76.) On this last point, I will note that it appears that Ginsburg made a drafting error and that she instead meant to recommend that the age of consent for statutory rape under federal law be reduced from 16 to 12 for offenders who were less than five years older than the target and to lower the maximum penalties for adults who had sex with 12-year-olds.
If the communications technologies that exist today had existed back in 1993, Ginsburg’s report would have gone viral as soon as her name was mentioned as one of the candidates to replace Byron White. It’s unlikely that her candidacy would have survived. The attack ads write themselves:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a crazy radical feminist. She wants to abolish Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. She wants to make it easier for sexual predators to prey on 12-year-old girls. She wants men and women prisoners to share the same prisons. She thinks that there are constitutional rights to prostitution and bigamy. She complains that the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts “perpetuate stereotyped sex roles.”
Is there room to quibble with some of these attacks? Sure. But they’re far more accurate than, say, your typical New York Times editorial.
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“The only question to be settled in the current fighting is when and where the cease-fire line will be drawn, in rough analogy to the Korean armistice agreement of 1953. And any U.S. president’s view will largely be shaped by Ukraine’s view of when to stop fighting. Then the hot war will become a cold one. Ukraine’s hand, I’ve said before, will be an enviable one. Russia’s won’t. Ukraine’s national spirit will be a conspicuous contrast to Russia’s lack of same. Kyiv will benefit from the West’s commitment to build up its military. Sanctions won’t be rolled back anytime soon. China won’t saddle itself unduly to support a failing Russia. The “global south” will get over itself and identify with a former colonial victim that rises up. Russia’s energy leverage won’t be resurrected. Moscow’s pariah status in global society won’t be cured as long as Mr. Putin or a Putin-like regime is in power.”
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“”Here’s what House Republicans uncovered recently, according to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.): “Over the course of several years, members of the Biden family and their companies received over $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to their associate, Rob Walker,” the March 16 statement reads. “Most of this money came as a result of a wire from a Chinese energy company and went not only to Hunter and James Biden, but also to Hallie Biden and an unknown ‘Biden.’ It is unclear what services were provided to obtain this exorbitant amount of money.””
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“Judge Burroughs’s opinion also addressed the striking fact that, when sending recruitment letters to potential applicants in “Sparse Country” (underrepresented states in the Harvard applicant pool), Harvard used an SAT score cutoff of 1310 for white students, 1350 for Asian American females, and 1380 for Asian American males. There were gasps in the courtroom when this evidence was revealed at trial. (When asked on the stand why a white boy who scored 1310 would receive a recruitment letter while his Asian American male classmate who scored 1370 would not, Fitzsimmons said, among other things, that “there are people who, let’s say, for example, have only lived in the Sparse Country state for a year or two,” and, by contrast, “there are people who have lived there for their entire lives under very different settings.”) Judge Burroughs downplayed the relevance of this disparate treatment, nding that it didn’t happen every year, it didn’t “seem to be linked to efforts to advantage or disadvantage any particular racial group,” and it was “unclear” whether it was accidental or intentional. And, despite acknowledging that receiving the recruitment letter “is correlated with a higher likelihood of admission,” she deemed it “fundamentally a marketing tool that does not affect individual admissions decisions”—thereby neutralizing one of the most troubling facts to emerge at trial.”
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“…for many decades after the State of Israel was founded, only the Knesset could legislate and no court could overturn legislation for any reason. Attorneys-general and all other legal advisers could be dismissed and their legal opinions bound no one. No government action could be reversed by the Supreme Court simply because the Court considered it “unreasonable.” In other words, the reforms will largely return Israel to the situation that prevailed before 1993, when Supreme Court President Aharon Barak launched his revolutionary campaign of judicial activism.”
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“From the 93rd Congress in 1973 to the end of the 110th Congress in 2008, there is remarkable parity between the two political parties, reaching a high water mark in 2008. In 2009, during the 111th Congress, Republican support for Israel remained steady, but Democratic support declined dramatically. This perfectly coincides with the founding of J Street in late 2007 and the founding of JStreetPAC the following year….The playbook is a very simple one—shout until you're hoarse that you love Israel, and then do everything you can to undermine its security…J Street and its ideological allies market [] to naive university students with a relentless barrage of inflammatory rhetoric, using terms like "occupation" and "apartheid." They have invested millions of dollars in college campuses, where teenagers are far more inclined toward radical activism than any other age group. In the 15 years since the founding of J Street U, the campus organizing arm of J Street, the group has achieved its desired result: The recent Gallup poll showing Democratic sympathy for Israel at a new low.”
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“As Israel’s internal debate spilled into the streets, Mr. Biden did the political equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire — declaring himself “deeply concerned” and siding with opponents of legislation designed to make Israel’s attorney general’s office and its judiciary more like America’s. … Imagine how Mr. Biden would react were we to give, say, Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas the power to pick the next Supreme Court justices.”
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