Displaying posts published in

September 2025

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Schools Are in Hooky Hell American children are skipping school in staggering numbers. By Larry Sand

By on September 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/12/schools-are-in-hooky-hell/

It’s early September, and children should be back at school, right?

Well, many aren’t. With data from 44 states and Washington, DC, the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) director of education policy, Nat Malkus, discloses that the chronic absenteeism rate—students missing more than 10% of school days each year—was an alarming 23.5% in 2024.

Malkus notes that the surge in absenteeism affects districts of all sizes, racial backgrounds, and income levels, but the data does reveal significant differences by race and ethnicity, with 39% of Black students, 36% of Hispanic students, 24% of white students, and 15% of Asian students chronically absent.

Additionally, while students from both low- and high-income families often miss school, the highest rates occur in low-income districts, where 30% of students are chronically absent. Still, the rate has gone up even in low-poverty areas, increasing from about 10% to over 15%.

High-achieving districts have also been affected by the new normal. Over 15% of students in the top third at those schools are chronically absent, compared to 10% before the pandemic.

States vary significantly in the number of student absences. While Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia have a 15% rate, Alaska’s is 43%, Oregon’s is 34%, and Michigan’s is 30%.

The problem is particularly egregious in our big cities. According to a recent report, in Los Angeles, where over 32% of students were chronically absent in the 2023-2024 school year, 34 elementary schools have fewer than 200 students, and 29 use less than half of the building.

Even worse, in Chicago, the chronic absentee rate is 41%. The city’s dwindling enrollment has left about 150 schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity. One Chicago high school had just 33 students last year.

No matter. The district’s spending of taxpayer dollars appears to be unaffected. On August 28, Chicago Public Schools approved a $10.2 billion budget, and at the same time, it is facing a $743 million deficit. Before the budget was approved, three major credit rating agencies each rated CPS General Obligation Bonds as “non-investment grade speculative,” also known as “junk bonds.”

What are education leaders doing to stem the tide of student flight?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

PROVE ME WRONG: CHARLIE KIRK’S FINAL CHALLENGE JONATHAN TURLEY

By on September 12th, 2025

https://jonathanturley.org/2025/09/11/prove-me-wrong-charlie-kirks-final-challenge-on-free-speech/

Yesterday, the United States entered a new and chilling stage of what I have called the “age of rage.” After two attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump, leading conservative leader Charlie Kirk, father of two, was gunned down at a campus event at Utah Valley University. I learned the news while I was in Prague to speak on my book,“The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” and the growing attacks on free speech around the world. I never imagined that I would be speaking about Charlie’s murder and what it represents for free speech.

I cannot claim to have been a close friend of Charlie Kirk, but I knew him and respected him. In his relatively short life, Charlie energized a generation of conservative college students at a time of intense liberal orthodoxy and intolerance.

Kirk came up with the brilliant idea of challenging liberals to simply debate issues from abortion to immigration.  His group would go to campuses and invite debate with signs reading “prove me wrong” and encourage liberals to engage in dialogue rather than violence.

The left had particular reason to hate Kirk.  Campuses have long been the bastions of the left, reinforced by faculties which now have few, if any, conservatives or Republicans. Higher education has long been an incubator for intolerance; shaping a generation of speech phobics who shout down or attack those with opposing views.

Kirk struck at the heart of that power base. Polls show that most students do not feel comfortable speaking about their values in our universities and many conservatives hide their views to avoid retaliation from faculty and students.

Kirk was changing that but showing students that they could be open and bold about their views. He told them that they did not have to yield to orthodoxy and the groupthink. Now he’s dead.

What is most chilling about the murder of Charlie Kirk is that it was not in the least surprising. Not anymore.

The response to TPUSA was all too often rage and violence. Liberals and anti-free speech groups like Antifa would trash their tables and threaten the students. Recently, at UC Davis, police simply watched as a TPUSA tent was torn apart and the tent carried off.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Memos point to Red Cross knowledge of Hamas presence in Gaza hospitals David Isaac

By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/memos-point-to-red-cross-knowledge-of-hamas-presence-in-gaza-hospitals/

Two Hamas documents found by Israeli forces in Gaza indicate that international organizations such as the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders are well aware of the presence of Hamas in the Gaza Strip’s medical facilities despite obfuscating or outright denying it publicly, NGO Monitor revealed on Wednesday.

The internal Hamas memos were among a cache of documents declassified by the Israel Defense Forces. NGO Monitor translated the Arabic-language documents into English and released them to the public.

“While repeatedly echoing Hamas allegations and condemning Israel’s operations to end the exploitation of hospitals for terror, these groups clearly knew that Hamas exploited these facilities and chose to remain silent,” said Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor.

The documents, dated February and March 2020, not only show Hamas’s deliberate strategy of placing its fighters, leaders and terror infrastructure inside hospitals in Gaza, but reveal that NGOs worked right next to them, in at least one case in an adjoining office.

“The [International Committee of the] Red Cross chose a wing in Al-Shifa medical complex that is adjacent to the [Hamas] movement offices,” notes the February 2020 document.

The memo also notes that the French branch of Doctors Without Borders “chose the only room in Abu Yousef El-Najar Hospital that has a (safe) communication landline.”

The Hamas documents explicitly state the terror group’s position that medical facilities are not neutral spaces, but a critical part of its infrastructure.

“Furthermore, these health facilities are a place of gathering for numerous leaders of the [Hamas] movement and the government during times of escalation,” the February memo said.

The memos, which originate with Gaza’s Interior Security Mechanism (ISM), an official body in the Hamas Ministry of Interior and National Security (MoINS), raise concerns about the Gaza Health Ministry authorizing NGO operations in Gaza without first consulting Hamas’s security apparatus.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Al-Sharaa’s Damascus Regime: Is Sharaa Really Doing All He Can or Was President Trump Set Up?by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21898/sharaa-syria-regime

The Trump administration will likely pressure Sharaa’s regime not to threaten Syria’s Kurds, who make up a large portion of the pro-US Syrian Democratic Army in northeast Syria.

Sharaa might also have to count on the US to resist pressure from his benefactor Turkey, which may be urging him to target Syria’s Kurds.

The question, however, remains if Sharaa is actually doing all he can to “protect all minorities” as he promised, or did Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, in pressuring US President Donald Trump to give Sharaa a chance to govern, set Trump up?

Is Sharaa truly on a path to joining the Western alliance, or is he really just a terrorist in a suit and tie?

One of the most unheralded geopolitical developments in the Middle East, following Israel’s military victories over regional enemies, is Israel’s diplomatic reaction to the new regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) in Syria. Recent meetings in Paris between high-level Israeli and Syrian diplomats have reportedly resulted in a de-escalation of tensions as well as in establishing significant security improvements for Israel along its border with Syria.

Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer was apparently successful in extracting a promise from the Sharaa regime not to dispatch Syrian military forces south of Damascus. This agreement exists in large part to safeguard Druze communities in Syria’s Suweida Province. Syria’s concession was in keeping with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated intention to defend the Druze against any repeat of July massacres by regime-affiliated terrorists and Bedouin tribesmen. An estimated 1,300 people were killed in the attacks, many of whom were Druze civilians, including women and children. Netanyahu’s pledge of protection to the Druze was possibly given to thank so many of Israel’s Druze citizens who have loyally been serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Just as significant was the Syrian regime’s agreement to demilitarize two of its provinces, Quneitra and Dara, both of which lie along Israel’s border. Now, evidently, no heavy weapons will be permitted in these Syrian provinces.

Damascus apparently did not challenge Jerusalem’s recent move into a new area in the Golan Heights that had been administered by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force since 1974. The new area is now being safeguarded by the IDF as a buffer zone between Israel and Syria.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Need More Charlie Kirks Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a chilling attack on free speech, but his legacy will inspire new generations to defend faith, freedom, and America First values. By Fred Fleitz

By on September 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/12/we-need-more-charlie-kirks/

I didn’t realize how good I had it when I was a conservative undergraduate student in the 1980s. Although liberals dominated my campus, the professors generally tolerated the free exchange of ideas. I helped co-found a College Republican club at my undergraduate school, Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, without worrying that this would harm my academic standing. I also learned to avoid the few far-left professors who abused their classes to indoctrinate students in socialist and anti-American ideologies.

I was a political science major at St. Joe’s. Fortunately, most of the political science professors were either conservatives or classic liberals who admired U.S. politicians like John F. Kennedy, Scoop Jackson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They loved their country and encouraged open debate in their classes. I was gratified in the early 1980s when the St. Joe’s Political Science Department fired a new professor who was using his international relations classes to teach Marxism and penalize conservative students.

Sadly, things changed for the worse in the decades following my graduation. Conservative and classic liberal political science professors retired and were replaced by far-left radicals who implemented classes in globalization, anti-capitalism, “anti-fascism,” anti-Israel and antisemitic ideologies, radical societal change, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), gender politics, and intersectionality. This far-left ideology spread across every college discipline, even the sciences.

Colleges and universities became radical left and extremely hostile to conservatives. Conservative students could not risk revealing their political views on campus because they feared this would hurt their grades and lead to harassment from fellow students.

Charlie Kirk believed this was unacceptable. This is why, in 2012, at the age of 18, he co-founded Turning Point USA to counter liberal politics and intolerance in U.S. high schools and colleges. Turning Point became a powerful national grassroots movement dedicated to identifying, organizing, and empowering young people to promote the principles of America First, free markets, and limited government.

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Horror in Queens By Dan McLaughlin

By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/horror-in-queens/

As if this week has not been horrible enough, a particularly dreadful crime in Bellerose, Queens, had the whole area of eastern Queens and central Nassau County in a panic the past 48 hours until the perpetrator was, mercifully, captured in Times Square late yesterday afternoon. Jamel McGriff, a 42-year-old out on parole with a long, violent rap sheet (including being required to register as a sex offender), went from door to door in leafy Bellerose in broad daylight at 10 a.m. knocking on doors until he found a target of opportunity — a couple in their late seventies whom he tormented and killed before setting their house on fire:

The suspect had earlier knocked on other doors in the neighborhood asking to charge his cell phone but was turned away before Frank Olton was seen on surveillance footage apparently allowing him in his backyard around 10:18 a.m., authorities said. The footage showed the owner apparently letting his killer in the rear door, according to cops. When the maniac left hours later, he was carrying a paper bag and one dark color bag, cops said…Once the fire was under control, police and firefighters made a grisly discovery. Frank Olton was found bound with a bungee cord in the basement and stabbed multiple times, while his wife’s body had been set on fire.

As Joe Marino, Georgett Roberts, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon of the New York Post reported, McGriff “was still on parole after being released from a 17-year state prison sentence in 2023, had been arrested for a sex attack of a worker at knifepoint inside a store in 2005 and other violent crimes. He had a criminal history dating back 30 years, including multiple robberies. The fiend had failed to register as a sex offender in November 2024 and he was wanted by the NYPD as a suspect in two recent robberies. Yet, he was not slapped with a parole violation, according to officials.” On Wednesday, the NYPD issued an alarmed warning: NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that McGriff was “armed and dangerous” and “The suspect’s MO is to go door to door, asking for some kind of assistance until he can gain entry.” The local police departments around Nassau were on heavy alert. The closest one could find to a motive for this brutality was robbery: McGriff was apprehended after “he used his victim’s charge cards at Macy’s and then to see a movie at the Regal Cinema in Times Square on Wednesday afternoon after he had pawned off two cell phones in the Bronx a day earlier.”

We have a serious under-incarceration problem when it comes to this sort of nihilistic predator. At least with his capture, multiple neighborhoods could go back to answering their doors and working in their yards.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Charlie Kirk was a better anti-fascist than most of the left His rage against Hamas and its barbarous Jewphobia was moral clarity in action. Brendan O’Neill

By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/11/charlie-kirk-was-a-better-anti-fascist-than-most-of-the-left/

There was a clip doing the rounds a few months ago from Charlie Kirk’s clash with students at the Cambridge Union. It featured Kirk going head to head with a fidgeting posh oddball whose ginger bouffant defied gravity. Anyone who’s ever visited Cambridge will be familiar with this kind of kid: woke, pompous, his arrogance entirely out of proportion to his intellect. Tell me this, said Kirk: ‘In the conflict of Israel vs Hamas, who’s the good guy?’ His diminutive adversary twitched and stuttered, then finally spoke. ‘Both Hamas and the Israeli government are evil’, he said, giving perfect voice to that bourgeois pusillanimity that falsely calls itself ‘activism’.

I was reminded of that clip today as lowlifes online branded Kirk a ‘Nazi’ in the wake of his brutal slaying in Utah. In the sewer of the internet, the seventh circle of woke, they’ve openly celebrated the savage killing of this young father of two. The more mainstream left, and the ‘liberal’ press, have played it safer, merely hinting that Kirk was ‘hard right’ and not averse to stirring up animosity himself. The Oxford Student – another university he visited on his trip to the UK – called him a ‘far-right influencer’ following his death. It’s a shameful piece that could have been headlined: ‘A fascist dies.’

Here’s what is so galling about the tarring of Kirk as a crypto-Nazi: he was a better anti-fascist than most of the left. It would have been absurd at any time to call him ‘far right’. You don’t have to share his views – he was anti-abortion, pro-gun rights, sceptical about climate change, worried about mass immigration and dubious that you can have a dick and be a woman – to recognise that they all fall within the realm of legitimate opinion. Millions of Americans think this way. But for the left to call him ‘far right’ now, in the post-7 October moment, after they’ve spent two years making excuses for the fascistic murder of Jews while Kirk raged against it, is risible. It is a sinister inversion of truth.

Kirk was enraged by the pogrom of 7 October. In that clash at Cambridge, with the student so well trained in the moral relativism of the modern campus that he couldn’t even draw a moral distinction between a neo-fascist army and the democratic state it attacked, he reminded his overeducated jeerers of what happened that day.

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HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Steven Malanga The 9-11 Lessons We Have Forgotten Twenty-four years later, the consequences that result from ignorance, naivete, and bad ideas remain clear.

By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/9-11-lessons-terrorism-immigration

One of the reasons George Santayana’s famous line about forgetting the past resonates is because humans can be so bad at remembering. That’s especially true about the past 25 years of liberal Western democracy. The twenty-first century brand of progressivism that’s corrupted so much Western thinking is all about moving on from a past inevitably deemed regressive. To someone like me, who lived through 9-11 in Manhattan and spent years writing about what we learned from it, the extent to which we have forgotten the lessons of that day and discarded so many of the principles we developed to defend ourselves is shocking.

Just perusing what City Journal published in the weeks after 9-11 is a reminder of how dangerously we as a culture have moved on. One notable story from that time warned about our “leaky borders,” which subsequent investigations would show played a crucial role in enabling the massive conspiracy that culminated in hijacking of four planes. Another piece from 2001 chronicled the rise of something called “militant Islam,” a term derided by some as racist and which prompted President George W. Bush to insist, in response, “Islam is peace.” A third story, the most chilling to read today, though it’s not principally about the U.S., described the rise of an Islamic “fifth column” in the U.K. that was radicalizing British youth. To think that I once worried that that term—fifth column—might be too extreme!

Those three stories represent how clearly we saw the threats back in 2001, and how thoroughly we’ve ignored them since then.

The irony of 9-11 is that it was successful because the bad guys learned their lessons from the past. Many people forget that the 2001 terrorists undertook the second attack on the World Trade Center. The first, eight years earlier, failed to cause widespread damage because the Muslim perpetrators underestimated how many explosives they would need to destroy the foundation of the North Tower. “Only” six people died that day. But what lived on was the idea among terrorists that the World Trade Center represented something fundamental about the West that they hated and wanted to destroy. They just needed to find a more effective way to accomplish their murderous ends.

One of the many differences between Western liberals’ thinking and that of Islamists is that they, as fundamentalists, cherish the past and absorb its lessons. We had our chance to do the same after the 1993 bombing and failed. The weeks and months after that attack were filled with executive orders, presidential directives, new legislation, and promises of international cooperations against terrorism. The Anti-Terrorism Act and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 barred terrorists from entering the country, facilitated the deportation of those here, and authorized funds to expand anti-terrorism units within law enforcement. Some of that money was supposed to go to assist coordination and communication among federal and local law enforcement.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charles Lipson The Left is celebrating Charlie Kirk’s killing. Democracy’s foundations are crumbling America faces a grim future of violence and counter-violence unless both sides understand the fundamental common ground of the US system

By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/09/11/the-left-celebrating-charlie-kirks-killing/

Political killings are among the vilest acts in a democracy, and among the most disruptive. The stable world of citizens – the essential backdrop of any constitutional democracy – is upended, its foundations shaken. After all, the heart of that democracy is free speech, free and peaceful assembly, and an orderly means of choosing leaders. Political assassinations strike at those foundations.

The impact is multiplied when several killings (or narrow escapes) happen within a few years. In that perilous moment, the nation looks beyond each act and asks, “Has something gone badly wrong in our country? Will the latest violence lead to still more?”

Those are the questions Americans are asking right now. They are especially urgent as the hunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer continues and as the nation remembers the most catastrophic and consequential act of political killing in recent history, the terrorist attacks of Sept 11 2001.

Charlie Kirk was a charismatic conservative activist, only 31 years old, but with years in the public eye and very close ties to President Trump and the Maga movement. At a time when that movement is flooded with articulate spokesmen, he was unique. Starting when he was only 18, he began building a following, a political movement, and an organisation, Turning Point USA. The result was impressive. It complements Trump’s Maga base but with a much younger following. As one friend wrote me, “There are thousands out there inspired by Kirk. Shock and heartbreak will give way to righteous determination to see our country aspire to Greatness again. Kirk inspired a generation. That generation is NOT going to be silent.”

Polling reinforces the point. Even before this tragic event, opinion polls have shown younger voters shifting sharply away from the Democratic Party and toward Republican and Independent affiliation. They are also voting with their feet, leaving progressive “Blue” states by the millions for conservative “Red” ones. They are flocking South for college, too, having watched the suppression of alternative views in the Ivy League and beyond.

How did Charlie Kirk inspire his followers? Not with vitriol or name-calling, but with engagement.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is America Heading Toward a New Civil War? The Left’s love for violence suggests that it is. by Robert Spencer 1 Co

By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/is-america-heading-toward-a-new-civil-war/

Is America heading toward a civil war? The assassination of Charlie Kirk shows yet again that the chasm between patriotic Americans and the left is certainly growing all the time and shows no signs of healing. One telling indication that the nation might be heading toward a new civil conflict is the fact that political tensions have not been this high since the run-up to secession and the attack on Fort Sumter, and that numerous leftists are increasingly open about their lust for violence, cheering.on Kirk’s death with unalloyed joy.

The murder of Charlie Kirk didn’t happen in a vacuum. Leftist leaders have been calling for violence, and now their calls have been heeded.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption — but I am now,” said far-left Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker back in April. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.” That was after Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Victimhood) said in February: “This will be a congressional fight, a constitutional fight, a legal fight, and on days like this a street fight, yes we will stand.” And that was not long after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Hey, I’m a Victim Too) said this of the “extreme MAGA Republican agenda”: “We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.”

Before them, it was Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Kamala Harris inciting leftist violence. And let’s not forget Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Grillmaster) saying in 2020, when condemning the pro-life leanings of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.”

Leftists outside of politics joined in the fun as well: remember, to take just a few of many available examples, Kathy Griffin holding Trump’s bloody severed head, or Madonna saying she wanted to blow up the White House, or Robert DeNiro bellowing that he wanted to punch Trump in the face.

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