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Ruth King

David Martin Jones The Closing of the Common-Law Mind

Illiberal and hypocritical — those few words capture the contortions of British judges who have ruled that the voices and votes of Brexit supporters need parliamentary endorsement. Consider the contradiction: those who would bow to Brussels also insist their own lawmakers are paramount.
The constitutional soap opera that is Brexit took on an interesting new plot line in November when the Queen’s bench division of the High Court for Justice heard the case of R Miller v The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. The panel of three judges found that the government did “not have power under the Crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 of the Treaty of European Union for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union”.

The political and media reaction was predictable. The Independent described the decision as a “momentous defeat” for the May government. The Guardian thought it the most “encouraging day” for Remainers since the vote on June 23. Champagne socialist MP for the super-rich ghetto of Hampstead, Tulip Siddiq, tweeted that the decision was a vindication of “parliament’s sovereignty”, whilst Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg promised that parliament would amend “any legislation” before triggering Article 50. By contrast, the Sun wondered, “Who do EU think you are?” and the Daily Mail disparaged “gloating Europhiles” who hailed Theresa May’s “humiliation”, and condemned the “out of touch judges” as “enemies of the people”.

The decision by the three High Court judges, all of whom have significant ties to the European Court and judicial system, has added a surreal new act to the evolving political drama. It also creates an unanticipated impediment to Theresa May’s announcement, at the Conservative conference in October, of “a quiet revolution” that would make the United Kingdom a “sovereign and independent” country once again. Australians, of course, need no such revolution as they already enjoy the sovereignty and constitutional liberty bequeathed to them by what the nineteenth-century constitutional authority A.V. Dicey termed the “imperial mother of parliaments”.

What was the ground for the judges’ dramatic decision, which they asserted dealt “only with a pure question of law”, and does it make legal or constitutional sense? Interestingly, in rejecting the prerogative power of the Crown, the judges reaffirmed Dicey’s view that only parliament has “the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law … as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”.

In order to establish the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, both Dicey and the High Court judges referred to the history of English common law and the great constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. In particular, alongside Dicey the judges cited the great oracle of the common law, Sir Edward Coke, who in his legal report on The Case of Proclamations (1610), ruled that “the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm”, because “the King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him”. This position was confirmed in the first two parts of section 1 of the Bill of Rights (1688), which stated “that the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by regall authority without consent of Parlyament is illegall”.

Germany Downplayed Threat of Jihadists Posing as Migrants by Soeren Kern

More than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 are being investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, according to the Federal Criminal Police.

The German experience with jihadists posing as migrants serves as a case study on errors for other countries to avoid. German authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants, many lacking documentation, to enter Germany without a security check. German authorities admitted they lost track of some 130,000 migrants who entered the country in 2015.

German authorities knew in early 2015 that Walid Salihi, an 18-year-old Syrian who applied for asylum in Germany in 2014, was recruiting for the Islamic State at his asylum shelter in Recklinghausen, but they did nothing.

Anis Amri, the Tunisian jihadist who attacked the Christmas market in Berlin, used at least 14 different identities, which he used to obtain social welfare benefits under different names in different municipalities.

“We have probably forgotten to take into account what political opponents such as the Islamic State are capable of doing and how they think.” — Rudolf van Hüllen, political scientist.

German political leaders and national security officials knew that Islamic State jihadists were entering Europe disguised as migrants but repeatedly downplayed the threat, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments, according to an exposé by German public television.

German officials knew as early as March 2015 — some six months before Chancellor Angela Merkel opened German borders to more than a million migrants from the Muslim world — that jihadists were posing as refugees, according to the Munich Report (Report München), an investigative journalism program broadcast by ARD public television on January 17.

More than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 are now being investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, according to the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA).

The revelations come amid criticism of U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s plans to suspend immigration from select countries until mechanisms are in place to properly vet migrants entering the United States. The German experience with jihadists posing as migrants serves as a case study on errors for other countries to avoid.

Based on leaked documents and interviews with informants, the Munich Report revealed that German authorities knew in early 2015 that Walid Salihi, an 18-year-old Syrian who applied for asylum in Germany in 2014, was recruiting for the Islamic State at his asylum shelter in Recklinghausen, but they did nothing. Some six months later, a search of Salihi’s accommodation produced a shotgun. Salihi was not deported.

Teenager in Germany Sentenced to Jail for Islamic State-Inspired Assault 16-year-old girl was found guilty of attempted murder and other charges in stabbing of police officer by Ruth Bender

BERLIN—A teenage girl who pledged allegiance to Islamic State was sentenced to six years in juvenile detention for stabbing and severely wounding a German police officer last February, ending the country’s first trial of an attacker accused of drawing inspiration from the militant group.

The 16-year-old girl, identified as Safia S., was found guilty of attempted murder, aggravated assault and supporting a foreign terrorist organization, the regional court in Celle that heard the case said.

Thursday’s sentence is substantially tougher than those handed down in recent terror-related trials, which have targeted unsuccessful plotters, members of designated terrorist organizations or people who had fought alongside such groups in Syria or Iraq before returning to Germany.

The trial of Safia S., who was 15 when she stabbed a federal policeman in the neck, was seen as a test of Germany’s ability to address the growing number of radicalized children and youth in its large Muslim community.

Juvenile law in Germany emphasizes the reintegration of youth offenders back into society and gives judges wide leeway in sentencing. While the sentence handed down to Safia S. was lengthy, it fell within the judge’s discretion, said Nikolaos Gazeas, a Cologne-based lawyer and expert on counterterrorism law.

Germany is still reeling from an attack in December by a Tunisian asylum seeker who rammed a stolen truck into a Berlin Christmas market, leaving 12 dead and scores wounded. Authorities have been under fire since it was disclosed that the perpetrator was a known extremist who had been on a security services’ watch list for months.

The court said chat logs found on the girl’s cellphone indicated that she carried out the stabbing in support of Islamic State, making it an act of terrorism. The trial, including the announcement of the guilty verdict and the sentence, took place behind closed doors because of the defendant’s young age.

Safia S.’s lawyer, Mutlu Günal, said he would appeal the verdict. He had argued in the girl’s defense that she had no intention of killing the policeman, didn’t have a terrorist motive and wasn’t in a position to measure the gravity of her act at the time she carried it out.

Safia S. was born and raised in Germany to a Moroccan mother and German father and has nationality in both countries.

Prosecutors argued during her trial that she had embraced the jihadist ideology of Islamic State by November 2015. But several security officials said the girl’s strict Muslim upbringing had certainly contributed to her radicalization. Videos disseminated on the internet, confirmed by authorities as authentic, show Safia S. at the age of 7, her head covered in a scarf, reciting the Quran with a well-known fundamentalist German preacher. CONTINUE AT SITE

A GOP Regulatory Game Changer Legal experts say that Congress can overrule Obama regulations going back to 2009. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Todd Gaziano on Wednesday stepped into a meeting of free-market attorneys, think tankers and Republican congressional staff to unveil a big idea. By the time he stepped out, he had reset Washington’s regulatory battle lines.

These days Mr. Gaziano is a senior fellow in constitutional law at the Pacific Legal Foundation. But in 1996 he was counsel to then-Republican Rep. David McIntosh. He was intimately involved in drafting and passing a bill Mr. McIntosh sponsored: the Congressional Review Act. No one knows the law better.
Everyone right now is talking about the CRA, which gives Congress the ability, with simple majorities, to overrule regulations from the executive branch. Republicans are eager to use the law, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy this week unveiled the first five Obama rules that his chamber intends to nix. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Pussy” Symbolism and the Masked Hatred of the Women’s March When vulgarity, emasculation and self-hate stands for empowerment. Dawn Perlmutter

“Pussy” was the primary symbolism and message of the January 21st Women’s March. From protest signs to the thousands of pink hats, it was in your face throughout the march.

The hats with the cute little cat ears were called “pussyhats” and were sponsored by the “Pink Pussy Project”. The women behind the ‘Pussyhat Project” decided that inundating the National Mall with a million handmade, cat-eared knitted hats, dubbed “pussyhats,” was the perfect emblem of solidarity and support for women’s rights. Their explanation was that the “pussyhat” was a play on the word “pussycat” but also referenced President Donald Trump’s infamous comments on a hot microphone from an “Access Hollywood” video.

They were successful. Both visually and substantially the Women’s March was characterized by cute cat-eared hats and the word “pussy.” Signs read: “Get Your Politics Out of my Pussy”; “The Pussy is watching” (which included a picture of a vagina); “My Pussy My Choice My Body My Voice”; “My Neck, My Back, My Pussy Will Grab Back”; “Stay Cunty”; “Pussy Trumps Tyranny”; “Not My Pussydent”; “Fear The Pussy”; “My Vagina has a better lineup than Trumps inauguration”; “Viva la Vulva” and much more. Other signs had images of fallopian tubes and vaginas. Several women were dressed as giant vaginas.

On the Pink Pussy Project website under the subtitle “Power of Pussy,” they explained the symbolism of their hats. “We chose this loaded word for our project because we want to reclaim the term as a means of empowerment.”

Perhaps someone should have explained to them that a significant aspect of the original feminist movement was to stop the sexual objectification of women. Equating women’s rights with the theme of “Pussy” is not a revolution — it is a devolution of women’s power. Reducing women to sexual objects was the substance of the criticism of President Trump’s private leaked conversation. If we follow the logic that was employed for the theme of the march, then there should have been women’s marches against Bill Clinton with thousands of women wearing torn pantyhose. They could have all bitten their lips in solidarity with the women President Clinton assaulted. They could have reclaimed the term “rape” as a means of empowerment and held up the exact same signs: “Get Your Politics Out of my Pussy”; “Not My Pussydent.”

The few men that attended the march held signs that read “I’m with her”; “We All Should Be Feminists” and “Men of Quality Do Not Fear Inequality.” The expression “pussy whipped” arguably fit nicely into the Women’s March theme.

These privileged, spoiled, angry women predicated their march on a locker room insult from 12 years ago. They could have had a platform on women who are sexually trafficked, on the millions of Muslim women who have no rights, on female genital mutilation, on prostitution, on honor killing, or on girls being sold into slavery. Instead they were more concerned about how they looked in their “pussyhats” and who held the most creative vulgar sign. They should have tried to march with their placards and outfits in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria and any number of other countries. Then they would have seen what real persecution and injustice look like. Their march was literally a day in the park where they could go home safely afterwards and feel self-righteous — as if they made a difference. However, their primary achievement was to stick their heads back in the sand instead of helping real persecuted women in any significant way. Indeed, they will not face the harsh realities of women being kidnapped and enslaved. And they will not acknowledge that the women who are doing their manicures and pedicures may be victims of human trafficking, or that they are endangering their little girls by dressing them provocatively. From their distorted self-hating worldview, sexual violence perpetrated by adversary cultures and ideologies is a myth.

It is ironic that the “pussy” theme is attributed to the new administration. But that word, if anything, might in fact be the perfect symbolism of the last administration — which did not have the courage to maintain redlines, help 200 Nigerian schoolgirls that were kidnapped or protect Yazidi women, who are being tortured and raped everyday of their lives. It is an administration that had a female Secretary of State who left Americans in Benghazi to die.

Europe’s Hate-America Brigade Back in business. Bruce Bawer

They’re back.

One of the pleasant things about the very best Dutch cafés is that most of them subscribe to a dozen or more newspapers from all over western Europe. It was thanks to this amenity that I became aware, soon after moving to Amsterdam from New York in the late 1990s, of the European media’s poisonous hatred for the United States. In the eyes of almost all European journalists, I discovered, America was a land of illiterates, cretins, racists, xenophobes, warmongers.

And that was under Bill Clinton. It got even worse under George W. Bush. To be sure, on the day after 9/11 a few editorialists took the “We Are All Americans” line, but others enjoyed the opportunity to spit at the victims of Ground Zero, declaring that America had asked for it. Swedish author Jan Guillou cheered the strike on “U.S. imperialism.” Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug sneered at somebody’s concern that the next target might be in Europe: Muslims, he explained, hate Americans, and with good reason; for Europeans, however, they had nothing but goodwill.

The Afghanistan war further intensified the European media’s anti-Americanism; and the Iraq war took it up yet another notch. Newspapers all over the continent accused Bush of terrorism, equated him with Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (or said he was worse than either of them), derided him as a puppet of Israel, depicted Guantánamo as the ninth circle of hell, and called for an end to the Atlantic alliance. “It is not easy to know whom one should believe in this world of Bushmen and Saddamists,” wrote an editor at Norway’s Dagsavisen, “where the truth is for sale and friends can hardly be distinguished from enemies.”

Then, one day, the anti-Americanism almost completely vanished from the European media. The date: November 4, 2008. Americans elected Barack Obama president, and suddenly America wasn’t so terrible after all.

Part of the reason for the shift was, quite simply, shock. For a long time, a core belief of the European media had been that the overwhelming majority of white Americans were racist cavemen. How to make sense of the fact that millions of them had voted to put a black man in the White House? European journalists couldn’t make sense of it.

But they knew one thing: they loved Obama. They had to love Obama. And they had to love him even more than Americans did – even more, indeed, than American journalists did. Because if they didn’t, they’d be the racists. (Of course, the fact that they thought this way made one thing crystal clear: they were racists, the whole lot of them.)

In any event, for eight years, the presence of a black man in the Oval Office not only made it impossible for the European media to criticize him; it made them hesitate to go after America itself, at least in the take-no-prisoners way they’d been accustomed to. Guantánamo remained open, and Obama’s policies helped make the Middle East even more destabilized and dangerous and led to the creation of ISIS. But you’d hardly have known it if you read the European press.

It must have hurt, having their hands tied like that for so long.

Race Hatred At the DNC They’ve learned nothing from the election results. Matthew Vadum

White people concerned about their country need to shut their mouths and have their future dictated to them by radical racist left-wingers, was the apparently unanimous verdict of the angry Democrats seeking to chair their party’s governing body at a recent candidate forum.

As Washington, D.C. radio host Chris Plante quipped, “They haven’t been this upset since we took away their slaves.”

White Americans, Democrats say loud and clear, are the enemy.

It is part of the ongoing meltdown among Democrats apoplectic that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. It manifests itself in the indignant screaming we now hear every day from the mainstream media every time President Trump makes it clear he really does intend to fulfill his campaign promises.

It is a result of the accumulated intellectual detritus from the Sixties mixed in with the identity politics that took over American campuses in the Eighties. “Politics is downstream from culture,” my late friend Andrew Breitbart observed, and now the culture has thoroughly infected the body politic.

Democrats are doubling down on the anti-white racism and identity politics-driven lunacy that became the norm during the Obama years.

So obsessed with nailing whitey to a cross were the DNC candidates that they overlooked the most glaring injustice of the past electoral cycle.

As Michael Sainato wrote in the New York Observer, all of the candidates attending the forum, including the Sen. Bernie Sanders-backed candidate, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), “refused to acknowledge the Democratic primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton.”

“There was so little dissent among the seven participants that at one point, when asked whether they thought the DNC tipped the scale for a candidate [Hillary Clinton] in the 2016 primary-a criticism lodged frequently and vociferously by Sanders’ supporters-none of the participants raised their hands,” he wrote, quoting Real Clear Politics.

Candidates to chair the Democratic National Committee all agree that their party needs to be more racist than it has become after eight years of incessant race-baiting and guilt-tripping by former President Obama.

Whites in the Democratic Party need to check their race-based privilege and zip it, according to DNC chairman candidate Sally Boynton Brown, who is executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party.

“Black lives matter and it makes me sad that we’re even having that conversation and that tells me that white leaders in our party have failed,” said Brown during the recent “DNC Chair Candidates Forum 2017” moderated by MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid. We have to teach Democrats “how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they’re white.”

Law And Order Returns To The Border President Trump begins fulfilling his promise to the American people in two historic immigration executive orders. Joseph Klein

President Donald Trump is doing something incredibly rare for a politician in Washington, D.C. He is keeping his word. Two of the most important of his campaign promises were to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into this country and to suspend the admission of “refugees” from countries prone to terrorism until a system of “extreme vetting” is put into place. On Tuesday night, President Trump tweeted out a teaser: “Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!”

After eight long years of Obama administration policies that endangered the security of the American people, President Trump is placing Americans first — before illegal aliens and self-declared “refugees” from terrorist prone countries.

The president began fulfilling his promises on immigration by signing two executive orders on Wednesday at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose responsibilities include overseeing immigration and border security. Mr. Trump also took part in a ceremony installing his new Secretary of Homeland Security, retired Marine General John Kelly. In his remarks following the signing, President Trump emphasized that DHS is a “law enforcement agency.” He added that “beginning today, the United States gets back control of its borders.”

The first executive order he signed redirected funds already appropriated by Congress towards paying for the construction of the border wall he has promised between Mexico and the United States. Additional funding appropriations will be required from Congress for completion of the project. However, President Trump still intends that Mexico will ultimately reimburse U.S. taxpayers for the expenditures through one means or another, including possibly redirecting monies presently slotted for foreign aid to Mexico or using revenue from border taxes. President Trump’s action came on the same day that Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, was due to arrive in Washington to help prepare for the visit of Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto later this month.

The order would end the “catch-and-release” policies the Obama administration utilized, under which illegals awaiting removal hearings were released. More detention facilities along the border are planned for construction. According to Immigration and Custom Enforcement figures cited by Fox News, 179,040 of the 925,193 illegal immigrants who have evaded a scheduled deportation had criminal convictions.

The Trump administration is anticipating roadblocks put in its way by legal challenges, including activists’ exploitation of environmental laws to block construction of the wall. However, the administration should be able to prevail and move forward expeditiously. The REAL ID Act of 2005 gives the Secretary of Homeland Security “the authority to waive all legal requirements such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads” along U.S. borders. Federal district courts have exclusive jurisdiction to hear challenges to the Secretary of Homeland Security’s determination, but a “cause of action or claim may only be brought alleging a violation of the Constitution of the United States.” Melinda Taylor, an environmental law professor with the University of Texas, said, “The new administration has a wild card they can pull and it’s in this law. The language in this law allows them to waive all federal laws that would be an impediment to building any type of physical barrier along the border, including a wall.” Actually, “the authority to waive all legal requirements” in the statute would extend to state and local laws and regulations, as well as federal laws. The president’s constitutional authority derives from his fundamental constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” – in this case, the nation’s existing immigration laws.

President Trump signed a second executive order addressing the so-called “sanctuary cities,” which have been openly defying federal immigration law enforcement. They may face the loss of certain federal funding if they continue their 21st century version of segregationist Governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door” in opposition to federally mandated school desegregation.

Handful of Countries with ‘Tremendous Terror’ Targeted for Immigration, Visa Block By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — President Trump said an upcoming order to suspend visas and immigration from a handful of Muslim-majority nations is “not the Muslim ban,” but “it’s countries that have tremendous terror…that people are going to come in and cause us tremendous problems.”

“Our country has enough problems without allowing people to come in who, in many cases or in some cases, are looking to do tremendous destruction,” Trump told ABC News in an interview aired Wednesday. “…You’ll be very thrilled. You’re looking at people that come in, in many cases, in some cases with evil intentions. I don’t want that. They’re ISIS. They’re coming under false pretense. I don’t want that.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at Wednesday’s daily briefing that Trump “has talked extensively about extreme vetting” and “you’ll see more action this week on keeping America safe.”

“As we get into that implementation of that executive order, we’ll have further details,” Spicer said. “But I think the guiding principle for the president is keeping this country safe. And allowing people who are from a country that has a propensity to do us harm, to make sure that we take the necessary steps, to ensure that the people who come to this country, especially areas that have a predisposition, if you will, or a higher degree of concern, that we take the appropriate steps to make sure that they’re coming to this country for all the right reasons.”

According to a draft of the order still subject to changes obtained by the Huffington Post, all entry of individuals from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen would be banned for 30 days. Visas would be suspended for 60 days from countries of “particular concern” — unknown if that correlates with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom list of the same name — while U.S. officials attempt to obtain security information from those countries. Interviews would be required with all visa applications.

Refugees from all countries would be blocked for 120 days while the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Director of National Intelligence unanimously decide which countries’ refugees will be allowed in. Fiscal year 2017 refugees would be limited to 50,000; President Obama allowed for 110,000 refugees.

All refugees from Syria would be blocked indefinitely, according to the draft. It would establish safe zones in Syria, thereby increasing U.S. involvement there.

“We are excluding certain countries. But for other countries we’re gonna have extreme vetting. It’s going to be very hard to come in. Right now it’s very easy to come in. It’s gonna be very, very hard. I don’t want terror in this country. You look at what happened in San Bernardino. You look at what happened all over. You look at what happened in the World Trade Center. OK, I mean, take that as an example,” Trump told ABC.

In the 2015 San Bernardino attack, terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook was born in Chicago while his wife, Tashfeen Malik, was a Pakistani who immigrated from Saudi Arabia on a spousal visa.

The Dictatorship of Equality By Gideon Isaac

In 1972 Congress prohibited discrimination in America’s schools — that is, discrimination based on gender. This law, Title IX, had a safety clause to prevent preferential treatment to women if there was an imbalance between women and men in some activity.

Unfortunately, the safety clause did not work. Colleges found that in practice they had to balance the number of young men and women in their sports programs numerically. As a result, they had to eliminate entire teams of young sportsmen — including swimming teams that produced Olympians. They often also had to eliminate “walk-ons” that is, people who were not recruited on scholarship, but decided they wanted to try out for a sport.

Before I go into the details, I will say that my impression is that laws that forbid discrimination become sticks to beat squares into circles by activists who believe that equality of opportunity means equality of result. And while it would seem that such bad logic could be ignored by the colleges, it cannot be.

When Heather Sue Mercer sued the Duke University football team, under Title IX, for dropping her off their roster, she won two million dollars. The Duke president testified that she had been given extra chances to make the team, and the coach said she didn’t have the strength to boot long field goals. But no matter, Heather got rich, and Duke learned a lesson. And not just Duke. When a Supreme Court ruling in 1992 made monetary damages available to Title IX plaintiffs, lawsuits alleging discrimination exploded in colleges and universities. As Jessica Gavora says in her book Tilting the Playing Field, “eager trial lawyers and women’s groups scoured the country for aggrieved female athletes, and found them — or manufactured them.”

In many of these lawsuits, the complaint was that the percentage of women in sports did not match their percentage in the student body. The percentage of women could be high. I noticed in one case more than 40% of women at a campus were in sports — but if the percentage of men in sports was higher, that was considered discrimination.

So is it really true that the interest in sports is equal between men and women? A survey was done at California State which showed that 57 percent of men were interested in participating, as opposed to 43 percent of women. But the university had to institute quotas anyway.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) became, per a former employee, “populated with zealots who had lost all objectivity. I knew something had changed when they began to refer to complainants as clients”.

It should be noted that it is not just the OCR that created the situation. There was blame to go around. There were activist groups, lawyers who wanted to make a buck, and of course the students who felt victimized, or claimed to feel victimized.

Thus men’s baseball, volleyball, soccer, cross-country, swimming, gymnastic, and wrestling teams all lost funding. UCLA dropped a swimming team that had produced twenty-two Olympic medalists, Brigham Young cut its top-ten-ranked men’s gymnastics team; and the University of Miami eliminated its men’s swimming program; which had sent swimmers to every Olympic Game since 1972. According to Robert Carle in “The Strange Career of Title IX”, a Chicago wrestling coach named Leo Kocher used data from the 1997 National Collegiate Athletic Association Gender Equity report to show that more than 20,000 male athletes disappeared from the ranks of the NCAA between 1992 and 1997.