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April 2019

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Congratulations to Texas Tech By Roger Clegg

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/texas-tech-eliminates-racial-preference-in-admissions/

As a result of a complaint that the Center for Equal Opportunity filed in 2004 against Texas Tech, the medical school there recently signed a Resolution Agreement (RA) with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, ending its use of racial preferences in admissions. As of March 1, “an applicant’s race and/or national origin are no longer to be considered.”

Kudos to Texas Tech: This is even more impressive than its run to the Final Four!

Our complaint was filed when, after the Supreme Court had issued its 2003 decisions narrowly upholding the use of racial-admission preferences in some circumstances, Texas Tech announced that it would begin considering race, notwithstanding the fact that it had not been doing so and had achieved plenty of racial and ethnic diversity nonetheless. In our view, since the Court made clear that race was not to be used except as a last resort, Texas Tech’s announced new policy was unjustifiable.

In the course of the 15-year investigation that followed, the university clarified or backed away from its 2005 pronouncement until, by last November, only the investigation of the five health-science schools remained. They, too, then clarified or backed away, so that by early this year the medical school was the only outlier. And on February 20 it came around, too. The relevant documents are posted on our website, here.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Pete Buttigieg and the Most Convenient Narrative By Jim Geraghty

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pete-buttigieg-and-the-most-convenient-narrative/

Jim Treacher asks when Mike Pence has ever had a quarrel with Pete Buttigieg, pointing out that the vice president has never said anything negative about the South Bend mayor.

The “quarrel” between Pence and Buttigieg more or less begins and ends with Pence’s decision to support and sign the Religious Freedom Restoration Act back in 2015, which allowed individuals and companies to cite their religious beliefs and significant burdens upon those beliefs in legal proceedings. Opponents such as Buttigieg charged that the law would allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. The law was broadly popular; it passed the Indiana Senate 40 to 10 and the Indiana House 63-31. After Pence signed it into law, opponents vehemently denounced the law as “state-sanctioned discrimination.” Several large companies, sports leagues, and nonprofit institutions threatened to boycott the state. After about a week, Indiana lawmakers enacted an amendment that clarified that the RFRA could not be cited in certain discrimination cases.

In today’s Morning Jolt, I went through Buttigieg’s autobiography and noted that he describes his relationship with the then-governor as “complicated,” but that complication is mostly disagreeing on the RFRA. Buttigieg can never muster any examples of Pence being rude, hostile, or hateful, or ever making an issue out of Buttigieg’s sexual orientation, but the mayor laments “the complications of being openly gay in Mike Pence’s Indiana.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hyper-Modern, Hyper-Adaptive—and Deadly Transnational criminal networks have evolved with a complexity that outstrips current institutional capacities, investigative tools, and judicial systems. Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/global-criminal-networks

Imagine that your son or brother has joined a protest against government corruption. During the demonstration, police arrive and force them onto a bus. You rush to the site of the event; you ask about him, but no one tells you anything. You keep searching, your anxiety mounting because you know the depth of the corruption in the city: police and the mayor often collaborate with local drug traffickers. You comfort yourself, remembering that your son or brother was with a large crowd. As the days pass, however, you realize that they weren’t taken into custody by the police; your son or brother has vanished. Two, then three, years pass, and you’re told that it’s too dangerous to keep looking, because “important” people were involved—the mayor, in fact, may have ordered local drug traffickers to kidnap the demonstrators.

What level of corruption is required for the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students, as happened on September 26, 2014, at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, State of Guerrero, Mexico—and getting away with it? It’s a corruption that goes beyond the traditional definitions that scholars advanced in the 1990s when defining administrative and systemic corruption, in which, say, a local political leader or police chief might receive kickbacks and bribes in exchange for going easy on crime. An international commission of experts investigating the Ayotzinapa events found something far more complex: the perpetrators “didn’t hide their identities,” and there had been possible coordination between the Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate, which was presumed to have killed the students, and at least 18 police patrol units from various municipalities, one state patrol unit, and government officials at various levels. Though some authorities received real-time information about the kidnapping, they didn’t act to protect the students. The commission also noted that Ayotzinapa is a hotspot for heroin trafficking to Chicago—but it is just one of 2,446 Mexican municipalities affected by the convergence of massive corruption and transnational criminal forces that traffic in drugs, arms, minerals, and human beings.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Income Inequality Comes Roaring Back Into The News Francis Menton

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-8-income-inequality-comes-roaring-back-into-the-news

With the demise of the Russian collusion hoax, you knew that something would have to emerge to fill the giant hole in the newspapers and the TV news shows. It looks like the old perennial of “income inequality,” after some time mostly off the front pages, is now the first mantra to be found rushing in to fill the vacuum.

So there we had Ray Dalio — serious mega-billionaire and Co-Chairman of the country’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates — showing up on CBS’s “60 Minutes” yesterday to proclaim that income inequality is a “national emergency”:

“If I was the president of the United States,” Dalio said, “what I would do is recognize that this is a national emergency. . . .” “The American dream is lost,” he said. “For the most part we don’t even talk about what is the American dream. And it’s very different from when I was growing up.”

Simultaneously, Mr. Progressive himself, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, turned up in Nevada (of all places) to promote his self-delusional presidential campaign, and chose income inequality as his theme. From today’s New York Post:

[T]here needs to be a “bigger discussion about income inequality and oppression of other groups including Latinos, Native Americans, Asian and women,” he said at the event organized by the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s Radical Uprising, 50 Years Later By Daniel Pipes

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/harvard-uprising-protests-1969-radicalism/

That takeover and bust culminated my political education.

Today marks 50 years of my political education. The events of April 9, 1969, helped make me who I am today and the university what it is.

I was a sophomore in college when my fellow students at Harvard University decided that politics, especially the war in Vietnam and the presence of a military-training program on campus, compelled them to take over the main administrative building, called University Hall.

Although opposed to this action, I joined the Communists of Students for a Democratic Society in University Hall to witness the uprising firsthand and take pictures. My photographs reveal about 250 students packed into the august President’s and Fellows’ Room, harangued as they disrespectfully stood and sat among its statues and under its portraits reaching high to the ceiling. The mood was triumphalist: Finally, students had taken matters into their own hands and showed those deans that they meant business! Flexing their muscles, the students escorted establishment lackeys out of the building, rifled through their files, and announced to humanity the dawning of a revolution.

Only, the revolution did not dawn. About 400 policemen entered University Hall at 3 a.m. and reminded the 500 students inside who the real boss was; that would be Harvard’s president. Letting off some righteous proletarian anger at the expense of pampered student radicals, the “pigs,” as they were then infelicitously dubbed, ignominiously beat and carted off the play-revolutionaries to jail.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The World Doesn’t Care About Groupthink By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/elites-share-common-interests-changes-conventional-wisdom/

Conventional wisdom may change in a flash (remember ‘peak oil’?), but elites remain elites, united by common interests.
“All things are in flux.” — Heraclitus

The adage “nothing last forever” is an understatement. Far more accurate is something like “nothing lasts until next week.”

Saint-to-Sinner Silicon Valley

A decade ago, even most Republicans admired the rugged entrepreneurialism of the high-tech Masters of the Universe who had built a multitrillion-dollar, world-dominating Internet, and the computer, mobile-phone, online-sales, and social-media industries, defined by marquee companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.

In turn, Democrats gave up their suspicions of big money, as they canonized liberal Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their wealth was okay, since the creators of it were progressives and dressed like Woodstock hipsters as they spread their billions freely among progressive think tanks, foundations, and political campaigns.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Rush to Judgment on the Newest Justice By Carrie Severino

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/brett-kavanaugh-rush-to-judgment-on-newest-scotus-judge/

A piece by Richard Wolf that ran over the weekend in USA Today posits that the anticipated “conservative takeover of the Supreme Court . . . has been stalled by a budding bromance between” Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s newest member, Brett Kavanaugh. The author’s principal evidence: Their disagreement in only one of 25 cases that have been decided so far this term with Kavanaugh’s participation. (The newest justice has not participated in six other cases decided to date.) They parted ways in Stokeling v. United States. There Roberts joined Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in dissent from the majority’s holding that the Armed Career Criminal Act includes a robbery offense that requires a defendant to have overcome a victim’s resistance.

If that much agreement sounds remarkable, consider that most of those cases were decided unanimously and that no pair of justices disagreed with each other on the Court’s judgment over the course of those 25 cases more than nine times. For some perspective on just how early it still is, note that the Court’s previous term had 19 decisions in which the justices split 5–4. Most of this term’s decisions have yet to be issued, and the highest concentration of sharply divided ones tends to come later in the term.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Beto O’Rourke wants farmers to hand over their ‘fair share’ of crops to stop global warming By Monica Showalter

By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/beto_orourke_wants_farmers_to_hand_over_their_fair_share_of_crops_to_stop_global_warming.html

Socialism with a boyish and syrupy face

Campaigning for president in Iowa, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke thinks farmers need to do their “fair share” to combat global warming, handing over some of their crops to save the Earth.Kid you not.  According to Breitbart News:Democrat 2020 presidential candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke proposed Friday in Iowa that the U.S. “allow” farmers to give up their “fair share” of crops to fight climate change.O’Rourke stood aloft as he proclaimed his message at a rally in Marshalltown, Iowa Friday:If we allow farmers to earn a profit in what they grow, if we allow them to contribute their fair share in combatting Climate Change by growing cover crops, allowing the technologies that invest in precision tilling and farming, capturing more of that carbon out of the air is another way in which they can make a profit.  Keep those farms together, pass them on to the next generation, and allow them to provide us our food and national security, our independence from the rest of the world, our ability to provide for the rest of the world.Where does he get the idea that farmers’ land and crops are “his” land and crops, to be used by the state as he deems fit?  That’s called a tax hike in ordinary terms, and state expropriation if you look at it closely enough.  Hugo Chávez used to think Venezuelan farmers’ land and crops were “his” land and crops once upon a time, too, and we all know how well that worked out.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Dear Pope Francis: A Border Wall Is The Most Humanitarian Policy Francis’s statement disregards not only the sovereignty of the American nation-state, but also ignorance of how generous America has been to the poor and vulnerable of the world.By Kevin D. Roberts

By on April 9th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/09/dear-pope-francis-border-wall-humanitarian-policy/

Pope Francis has intruded into American politics again, riffing critically on border walls and capitalism. Once again, serious Catholics, including me, are dismayed by the holy father’s ignorance on the issue.

Francis’ remarks— especially his comment that “those who build walls will become prisoners of the walls they put up”—reveals an incomplete understanding of the crisis. Were he to acknowledge the entirety of the current crisis at the border, including the egregious actions of human smugglers and human traffickers, his prodding might find better currency among American policymakers.

As it is, however, his statement displays an unfortunate disregard not only for the sovereignty of the American nation-state, but also a truly unfortunate ignorance of how generous America has been to the poor and vulnerable, especially those who appear on our borders and shores.

Francis has decried the building of a wall, and the free market, which he continues to conflate with the crony capitalism of Latin America. What an irony, considering that Central American migrants are leaving their homelands because those nations have neither the rule of law nor the economic opportunities that the pope rightly wishes everyone to have.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

We Will Never Fix Campus Indoctrination Until We Cut College Subsidies Debt-financing by America’s youngest generation has made it possible for universities offer politicized, useless majors and administratively driven indoctrination. Dustin Steeve

By on April 9th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/09/will-never-fix-campus-indoctrination-cut-college-subsidies/

Last month, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities.” Some hailed the order as a much-needed response to rising illiberalism on college campuses, while others called it a solution in search of a problem.

Like many, when I first heard about the order, I focused on the goal. The first question that came to my head was: “Do we really want the government to be in the business of legislating ‘free inquiry?’”

That’s an interesting political philosophy question, but it avoids the fundamental problem of universities these days: debt-financing enables the administrative and academic departments targeting free speech on campus and silencing conservatives.
People Think College Is About Education, But It’s Often Not

Higher education is riding on its reputation as a gateway to a bright future. As of 2018, 82 percent of Americans believed a four-year degree was either “very” or “somewhat” good preparation for attaining a well-paying job. However, recent events have eroded that reputation, especially amongst conservatives.

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