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Ruth King

Medical Journal Editorial Urges Lawfare against Oil Companies: Wesley Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/medical-journal-editorial-urges-lawfare-against-oil-companies/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Our most venerable medical journals have gone political, continually espousing the redefinition of our most contentious political controversies — race, climate change, guns, etc. — into public-health emergencies to permit the authority of medicine and people’s trust in doctors to sway outcomes.

A Perspectives editorial penned by law professors in the New England Journal of Medicine enters the fray again, this time, advocating lawfare by governments against fossil fuel industries. The authors take heart from a legal settlement between a Louisiana parish and oil companies. From, “State and Local Climate Litigation for Protecting Public Health:”

The case filed by Cameron Parish, which was settled in December 2023 for an undisclosed amount of money, was one of many that have targeted the oil industry. Louisiana communities have filed more than 40 lawsuits against oil companies over their dredging activities, alleging that the companies’ actions polluted local bodies of water and made the communities more susceptible to flooding.

In first five years, 79,000 of DACA recipients admitted to U.S. had arrest records New report found some DACA recipients “may have obtained lawful immigration status, failed to request renewal.”By Bethany Blankley

https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/first-five-years-79000-daca-recipients-admitted-us-had-arrest-records

Within five years of a new program created to prevent deportation of minors brought into the country illegally by their parents, nearly 80,000 were released into the U.S. with arrest records.
 

The majority were between the ages of 19 and 22 when they were arrested, according to the latest available data published by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced he was expanding deportation protections and job opportunities for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created by executive order by former President Barack Obama in 2012.

According to USCIS, DACA applies to those who were brought into the country before reaching age 16 and were under age 31 as of June 15, 2012, among other criteria.

Tuesday was the 12-year anniversary of DACA, which a federal judge has twice ruled is illegal. Several states, led by Texas, are still fighting to end DACA in a case that is expected to eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, The Center Square reported.

While the majority of DACA supporters argue recipients should be granted citizenship, claiming they contribute to the U.S. economy and are constructive members of society, others argue those with criminal records, at a minimum, should be deported.

According to a USCIS report, in the first five years of DACA being implemented, from June 2012 to October 2019, nearly 80,000 illegal foreign nationals with prior arrest records, including for violent crimes, were granted DACA status.

Blue Morning Unchecked border-crossings, fading churches, disintegrating families, DEI deans and worthless degrees ensure that the American future will be miserable and that those who will inherit it will be DemocratsMichael Lind

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/blue-morning-inherited-future-demographics

In The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), John Judis and Ruy Texeira argued that college-educated professionals and nonwhites, along with a minimum number of working-class whites, could form the basis for Democratic hegemony in national politics. As Judis and Texeira point out in their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023), Democratic strategists and journalists adopted a distorted, dumbed-down version of their thesis in which the Democratic Party could do without working-class non-Hispanic white voters at all. Conversely, the modest decline of Hispanic and Black voter support for the Democrats in the last few elections has led some to suggest that a racial realignment is underway that might enable Republicans to emerge as the party of the “multiracial working class.”

A more plausible explanation, however, is that Joe Biden has always been an unpopular candidate made more unpopular by inflation and botched immigration and foreign policies—and that he is likely to win anyway. Most demographic trends still favor the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. Democratic constituencies continue to grow as shares of the American electorate, while core Republican electoral blocs are steadily declining.

Consider the interaction between voting and religious belief. According to 2024 polling data, Republicans win supermajorities among only two religious groups—white evangelical Protestants (85%) and Mormons (75%)—while eking out bare majorities with white nonevangelical Protestants (58%) and Catholics (52%). All of these Republican-leaning religious communities are dwindling. As a share of the American population, white evangelical Protestants have shrunk by roughly a third from 33% in 1999 to only 21% in 2021. In only 15 years, from 2007 to 2023, Mormons also declined by about a third as a share of the U.S. adult population, collapsing from 1.8% to 1.2%. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are no longer the majority even in Utah. Since 2007, the Republican-leaning white Catholic share has dropped by 8 percentage points.

If demographic trends favor Democratic hegemony, why not maximize immigration? Why not expand the welfare state to enable illegitimacy? Why not pass out affirmative action bribes to newly invented official nonwhite ‘races’ like MENA?

How The Doctor At The Center Of Latest Texas Children’s Hospital Scandal Built An Alliance With Transgender Activists The doctor teamed up with professional transgender activists in a bid to halt a Texas law defending children from transitions. Spencer Lindquist

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

Dr. Richard Ogden Roberts III is a pediatric endocrinologist at the Texas Children’s Hospital who’s administered puberty blocking and cross-sex hormone medications to young patients suffering from gender dysphoria. He was also one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that sought to halt a ban against child sex changes, leveraging his medical credentials as he worked alongside radical activist organizations.

Now he’s found himself at the center of a new scandal at the hospital, which has been enveloped in criticism after one whistleblower exposed the hospital for lying to the public about their offerings of transgender medical interventions to children and was then targeted by the federal government as a result.

New allegations that Roberts committed Medicaid fraud have cast further doubt on his so-called “gender-affirming care” operation, with a whistleblower claiming that the hospital “is illegally billing Medicaid for transgender procedures” with the help of Roberts, who is now being investigated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton since the state bars the use of Medicaid funds for any and all medical interventions that seek to change people’s sex.

Roberts embodies the partnership between radical transgender ideologues and the medical establishment. A closer look at Robert’s effort to halt Texas’ ban on child sex changes indicates that the doctor formed an alliance with far-left ideologues and activist groups, many of which enjoy the backing of the pharmaceutical companies that stand to profit from transgenderism in the process.

Daniel DiSalvo Renewing the Republic A new book offers a compelling defense of the U.S. Constitution.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/renewing-the-republic

Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism, by Dennis Hale and Marc Landy (University of Kansas Press, 2023). 

The United States Constitution is under attack—again. The chorus of critics—including prominent law professors, journalists, political scientists, and politicians—seems to grow louder daily. They call it a broken relic, standing in the way of furthering equality and social cohesion.

They say that the Constitution encourages excessive individualism, inequality, racism, isolation, and anomie. Only by jettisoning this eighteenth-century artifact, the argument goes, can America finally embrace the progressive ideals of unfettered majoritarianism, racial harmony, and economic redistribution. Doing so would make the American people freer, happier, better governed, more equal, and more community-oriented. God himself may even look kindly on us.

Such arguments have stirred two distinguished Boston College political scientists, Dennis Hale and Marc Landy, to mount a vigorous and erudite defense of the American constitutional order. In Keeping the Republic, the authors weave together political theory, institutional analysis, and policy history to offer a compelling case for preserving America’s constitutional democracy and republican ethos.

Import the Caracas slums, become the Caracas slums: thanks, Joe Biden By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/import_the_caracas_slums_become_the_caracas_slums_thanks_joe_biden.html

Based on the narrative of the left, we’re not supposed to notice anything new or negative about the unvetted foreigners rolling through on Joe Biden’s open border plan. Nothing to see here, move along.

There are those who give the flawed statistics about illegal immigrants commiting less crime than ordinary Americans, which must be very satisfying for the left to cite, given that the left believes America is a fundamentally flawed country. It’s odd how many foreigners want to come to this fundamentally flawed country, but the left has never been able to answer that one.

There are others, such as the Associated Press, which makes matters easier for us, by not printing the immigration status of people caught up in ugly crimes against Americans. That way, see, we won’t notice.

But it’s getting increasingly hard to ignore the new waves of crimes coming about from recent illegal border crossers — seems we are seeing a new grotesque crime every day, with women and children in the crosshairs almost like a slow motion Oct. 7.

The New York Post, which does notice the things the AP won’t, has a list of three:

One of the illegal Venezuelan migrants accused of strangling and killing 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas cut the ankle monitor he was given at the border after the slaying, The Post can reveal.

Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, 21, and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, were both released into the US with GPS monitoring after illegally crossing the southern border into El Paso, Texas this year.

Rangel Martinez, who crossed the border on March 14, was released from the monitoring program on May 15 because he had no known criminal history and had complied with check-ins, sources said.

“Greenlash” is Here:Ruy Teixeira

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/greenlash-is-here

The results from the recent European parliament elections were quite something. Right populists did very well indeed while the European Greens took big losses. They lost 18 of their 72 seats in the European parliament and their performance was particularly bad in the E.U.’s two largest states, Germany and France. In Germany, the core country of the European green movement, support for the Greens plunged from 20.5 percent in 2019 to 12 percent. Shockingly, among voters under 25, the German Greens actually did worse than the hard right Alternative for Germany (AfD). That contrasts with the 2019 elections, when the Greens did seven times better than the AfD among these young voters.

And in France, Green support crashed from 13.5 percent to 5.5 percent. The latter figure is barely above the required threshold for party representation in the French delegation.

The Greens’ overall poor performance means they are now behind not only the traditionally largest party groupings—the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the social-democratic Socialists and Democrats group and the liberal Renew Europe group, but also both right-populist groupings—the European Conservatives and Reformists (which includes Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) and the Identity and Democracy group (which includes Marine LePen’s National Rally group)—and even the non-affiliated group (which includes Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Hungary’s Fidesz party).

There’s a reason for this. While there’s no doubt that concerns about immigration were key to the right populist surge in these elections, the role of backlash against green policies (call it “greenlash”) should not be underestimated. And the fattest target for this greenlash was naturally the Greens, the most fervent proponents of the European “Green Deal” and associated policies. The implications of this are huge. As Adam Tooze, himself a strong supporter of green policies, admits:

The elections have tilted the European political balance against the green agenda which has served as an important reference point for politics in Brussels for the last five years….Even if Ursula von der Leyen succeeds in her bid for a second term as Commission President, she will not be pursuing the full-throated green-forward policy that launched the Green Deal in 2019 and Next Gen EU in 2020….There is a groundswell of opinion in Europe that is preoccupied with the cost of living, wants to keep its internal combustion-engined cars and sympathizes with farmers in their opposition to green regulation.

The Affordability Crisis Is Shaping Up as a Key Issue in the Election — and Trump Has the Advantage Not enough has been written about this from a political standpoint. Only it sure should come up in the debate next week.Lawrence Kudlow

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-affordability-crisis-is-shaping-up-as-a-key-issue-in-the-election-and-trump-has-the-advantage?

It’s a kitchen table election. Heading toward the CNN Presidential Debate next Thursday, one would think President Trump would be pulling together a scathing critique of President Biden’s performance regarding that old political cliché, kitchen-table issues, which surfaced again in the form of today’s affordability crisis for working folks.

Things like inflation, groceries, gas prices, et cetera — and I’ll get to those. Yet there’s an underrated issue which is looming larger and larger. And that is unaffordable housing.

Existing home sales for May came in just more than 4 million units — which is the lowest in 30 years. During the Trump years, home sales were running around 6 million.

Meanwhile, average home prices came in at $419,300, and that is a record high going all the way back to the recorded data beginning in 1999.

Pre-pandemic, during Trump’s term, home prices were running $270,000-plus.

And one of the keys to the unaffordable housing affordability crisis is the mortgage rate that has been running pretty consistently around 7 percent during the Biden years compared to below 4 percent during the Trump years.

Yes, it’s quite true that all these zoning-related regulatory burdens imposed by blue-state Democrats have limited the available supply of homes.

And it’s also true that a lot of those same blue-state Democrats want to incorporate the suburbs into the cities in order to build public housing and force crazy climate change regulations. Anything to stop gas-powered autos and basically destroy the value of your home.

Yet even in the healthier red states, sky-rocketing mortgage rates and home prices have made it very difficult, if not impossible, for working folks of any color or stripe to afford to buy a home — and in particular that includes younger folks.

Not enough has been written about this from a political standpoint. Only it sure should come up in the CNN Presidential Debate next week.

Harvard, in New Filing in Court, Suggests Its Jewish Students Were Too Fearful in the Wake of October 7 Who’s to blame — the lawyers or the client? Ira Stoll

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvard-in-new-filing-in-court-suggests-its-jewish-students-were-too-fearful-in-the-wake-of-october-7?lctg=1474955502&recognized_

Harvard reportedly spent more than $25 million, mostly on the law firm WilmerHale, defending the racial preferences in college admissions that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional. After losing the landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case in June 2023, Harvard again turned to WilmerHale to prepare its president, Claudine Gay, for a December 2023 congressional hearing on Harvard’s response to antisemitism. 

President Gay’s performance at the hearing was widely denounced.  Both she and the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, who also relied on WilmerHale for pre-hearing preparation, resigned after apologizing for giving overly legalistic answers suggesting that whether calls for genocide against Jews violate their university policies would depend on the “context.” 

Now Harvard is facing a third embarrassment. This past week, one of the same lawyers who tried the Asian-American admissions case, Felicia Ellsworth, who sat in the first row behind Ms. Gay in the December congressional hearing, joined three other WilmerHale lawyers and four from another firm in filing a motion to dismiss and strike a complaint filed in court by Jewish students alleging antisemitism at Harvard.

The students, Alexander  Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism, Inc., said that on October 19, 2023, a mob stormed Harvard Law School. “Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, or hid under desks,” their complaint says. In a memo supporting the motion to dismiss and strike, the lawyers for Harvard said that the Jewish students do not “describe an environment in which an objectively reasonable person would fear physical violence.”

By basically calling Harvard’s own Jewish students unreasonable for fearing violence less than two weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel, the lawyers risk proving the complaint’s point about Harvard antisemitism, rather than persuading Judge Richard Stearns to dismiss it. 

Fauci Was Just a Symptom By Jeffrey H. Anderson

https://tomklingenstein.com/fauci-was-just-a-symptom/

Editor’s Note: Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci has emerged as a living symbol of federal abuses: lockdowns, mask mandates, and myriad other arbitrary restrictions that unduly burdened the lives of ordinary citizens. Yet there is nothing exceptional about the former NIAID head; he is merely one of countless bureaucrats in Washington who feel entitled to rule their countrymen by the mandate of expertise. Jeffrey H. Anderson reviews RFK Jr.’s recent book on America’s most controversial doctor and concludes that Fauci is not just a bad scientist, but an embodiment of the grave threat posed by a new regime to our Constitution and our way of life.

The mainstream press corps prefers to deal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by pretending that he doesn’t exist. This is true both for his presidential campaign—which is thought to pose too much of a threat to President Biden to risk acknowledging it—and for his popular book, The Real Anthony Fauci.

Relegated to Skyhorse Publishing, which Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith describes as “something of a refuge for the cancelled,” Kennedy’s book nevertheless cracked the top 15 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list for 15 consecutive weeks—topping out at #7. Yet apparently it did not merit space in the Times for a review. Wikipedia quickly dismisses The Real Anthony Fauci as a “controversial” book by a “conspiracy theorist” who unjustifiably “attacks” Fauci and “offers disinformation.” 

In truth, however, Kennedy’s book is a valuable and generally well-researched indictment of the public health establishment, and more broadly of anti-republican rule by “experts.” While the book’s claims should not be taken as gospel in the way that the credulous press corps hangs on Fauci’s every muddled word, Kennedy shows impressive willingness to stand strong against the current, and his informative and rather countercultural book is very much worth a read. He makes a compelling case that—from AIDS to Covid—Fauci and friends have been pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the American people.