EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The Battle Against Identity Politics on Campuses Has Only Begun Even as Trump targets Harvard over racial preferences, the university is offering a seminar, “Empowering Black Leaders,” steeped in racialist thinking.

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-empowering-black-leaders-seminar-race-trump

The effort to extirpate identity politics from universities will be a slog. Even as the Trump administration scrutinizes Harvard University for its racial preferences and cuts another $450 million in federal grants, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is offering a three-day seminar called “Empowering Black Leaders: Strategies for Personal and Professional Success.” Topics include “Navigating bias in the workplace,” “Intersectionality in its various forms,” “Racial equity in policing,” and “Employee resource groups.”

That last phrase is a euphemism for affinity groups, those identity-based organizations in schools and businesses that came into vogue over a decade ago. Affinity groups allegedly allow intersectional individuals to collectively protect their identities against bias. Kennedy School organizers and other human-resources types are hoping that a new name will shake off the separatist associations from the original term.

Empowering Black Leaders is led by a diversity consultant, “one of the world’s leading experts,” as the program brochure puts it, on the “science underlying bias and racism in organizations.” Robert Livingston encapsulated his world-class expertise on institutional racism in a 2022 book, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth about Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations. Speaking the truth about racism in a corporate leadership seminar means addressing the topic “Racial equity in policing,” since racist police, one is to assume, impede black managers’ ability to climb the corporate ladder.

The Kennedy School has tried to Trump-proof Empowering Black Leaders by noting that a “person’s race/ethnicity is not a criterion for admission.” The program materials even posit a scenario where non-black allies (another academic coinage) enroll in the program so as to “allow them and the Black colleagues they are supporting to thrive.” Such allyship doesn’t come cheap. The course costs $6,900. Are businesses going to shell out close to $7,000 a head to send their black managers and their white allies to learn about the businesses’ alleged racism? In the pre-Trump world, quite possibly. Today, less so. Though the application deadline was April 29, 2025, as of May 14, the Kennedy School was still soliciting applications.

Despite the effort to be just sufficiently color-blind enough to pass muster from an anti-DEI federal funder, assumptions about racial hierarchy are baked into the program. The seminar is designed for “mid-senior level leaders in North American, Europe, and similarly structured societies,” according to the program brochure. What “similar structure” might that be? Elite-dominated? Welfare-statist? Demographically self-cancelling? No, the common link between North American and European “societies” is their embrace of white supremacy. Thus, any black professionals living on those “similarly structured” continents need consultant-provided tools for overcoming what the program refers to as “commonly shared obstacles” to advancement.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Great Simmering in the West By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/the_great_simmering_in_the_west.html

So-called ‘elites’ have built a dark and volatile world.

People all over the world are worried about the future.  While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many.  However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors.  Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders.  Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions.  Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.”  With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.  

As emerging robotics programs have demonstrated, no profession will be immune to the next generations of A.I.-equipped machines.  Robots will pick the fields, police the streets, and perform complex medical surgeries.  A.I. can already write legal briefs that pass muster and screenplays that are at least as interesting as anything Hollywood produces these days.  Engineers, architects, and chemists are competing against machines that can process a thousand lifetimes of computations before their human counterparts finish morning coffee.

Men such as Gates and Harari see this future galloping toward us and view its implications as self-evident.  As human producers are replaced, human “value” will dwindle.  No longer sustaining even a fraction of their cost through their own labor, human beings will become extraneous to the creation of wealth and permanent drains on the global State.  

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Qatar & Influence Operations and Saudi Arabia & Influence Operations Let’s refresh. Diana West

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://dianawest.substack.com/p/qatar-and-influence-operations-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2175125&post_id=163628450&utm

Before there was Qatar & influence operations, there was Saudi Arabia & influence operations. If it is Qatar is in the headlines for buying politicians, media, universities, and for its terrorist connections, Saudi Arabia was making the same headlines and more (anyone remember 9/11?) a few years ago. Don’t look now, but Saudi’s Alwaleed bin Talal is a constant player. For starters, he was Fox’s No. 2 owner then, and he is Twitter’s No 2 owner today. Meanwhile, according to Forbes, Qatar threw a few hundred million dollars into Elon’s Twitter purchase as well. Who knows?

Maybe, we are all Qataris now.

How did this happen? Some rather important part of it starts with Alwaleed’s buy into the leading American conservative media network, Fox News, over twenty years ago. The Saudi stake would grow to 7 percent, second only to holdings of the Murdoch family. I am posting a syndicated newspaper column I wrote on the subject in 2010. The whole thing bothered me then as it all bothers me, and greatly in this week of Trump’s Arabian Processional, about which I will have more to say. For now, the 2010 column, posted below, will serve as a refresher course — and for me, as well.

I will note that this column and hundreds more are collected in my 2013 book, No Fear.

Should Fox News register with the State Department as a foreign agent — an agent of Saudi Arabia? by Diana West, February 7, 2010

First off, is that a farfetched question? Not when a leading member of the ruling family of the Sharia-totalitarian “kingdom” of Saudi Arabia, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, has made himself the second-largest shareholder of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Fox News’ parent company.

Just as Steven Emerson believes that American universities using Saudi mega-millions (many from Alwaleed) to set up Islamic studies departments should register as Saudi agents, I believe an American news channel part-owned and part-influenced by the Saudi prince should, too.

BOOKS Comments turned off

At Home With the Holocaust A scholarly exploration of the complex ways traumatic memory is passed intergenerationally. by Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/at-home-with-the-holocaust/

On March 11, 2025, Rutgers University Press released At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives by Lucas F. W. Wilson, PhD. At Home is 188 pages long, inclusive of an index, end notes, and a bibliography. The book’s goal is to analyze how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are traumatized by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. The book focuses on how homes – that is, houses and geographic locations – can transmit trauma from one generation to the next.

In an online biography, author Wilson says, “I am the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary.” On a University of Calgary page, Wilson follows his name with “Pronouns: he/him/his.” In an interview, Wilson says, “My work has largely centered on the Holocaust, but given the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans violence, public policy, and legislation, I redirected my attention on a main catalyst of homophobia and transphobia today: white Christian nationalism …  Both the Holocaust and conversion therapy are inextricably connected to Christianity … The Christian scriptures and Christian theology laid the seedbed for the Holocaust … Christianity has so easily lent itself to such hatred.” Christians have “genocidal intentions” toward GLBT people, Jews, and “Indigenous folks in North America.”

Wilson, though young, is an exceptionally successful scholar, enjoying a degree of financial support and accolades that most scholars can only dream of. “I have received several fellowships and awards for my work.” An incomplete list of his honors: The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi’s Dissertation Fellowship; a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship; The Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives; a Regent Scholarship, two Edwin L. Stockton, Jr., Graduate Scholarships from Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and a Zaglembier Society Scholarship awarded by The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

At Home with the Holocaust has received high praise. Scholar and author Victoria Aarons says that the book “makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants with the Holocaust meets the needs of a reader happily immersed and unquestioningly invested in academic trends in writing styles, thought processes, ideology, and ethics. I am not that reader. This book exemplifies serious problems in contemporary academia, as I will detail in the review, below. First, a word on why I care about this topic.

As soon as I saw the Rutgers University Press ad for this new book, I was eager to read it. I have been swimming in the water of post-World-War-Two trauma for my entire life. I’m a baby boomer, a drop in the post-World-War-II demographic surge. I didn’t give it much thought in my childhood, but I was surrounded by post-war trauma.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Unveils “America First National Security 2.0” During Visit to the Arabian Gulf In Riyadh, Trump unveiled an “America First 2.0” doctrine—favoring trade over war, diplomacy over regime change, and peace through prosperity in a new world order. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/16/trump-unveils-america-first-national-security-2-0-during-visit-to-the-arabian-gulf/

President Trump’s trip this week to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was a great success for many reasons. The trip was also historic due to a speech he gave in Saudi Arabia outlining his America First foreign policy, which could transform global security.

In this speech, delivered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 13, Trump unveiled his second-term approach to foreign policy that might be called “America First National Security 2.0.”

Most of Trump’s America First approach to U.S. foreign affairs is well known. He has called for putting the interests of our country and the American people first in national security policies. Trump wants a strong military but has pledged to use military force prudently to keep our country out of new and unnecessary wars. He has condemned bad treaties favored by the foreign policy establishment, like the Paris Climate Accord, that will have no effect on the global climate but will do serious damage to the American economy.

In his Riyadh speech, President Trump doubled down on his previous America First national security policies with a revolutionary plan to promote stability and peace through economic prosperity in the Middle East and around the world. Deputy opinion editor of Newsweek Batya Ungar-Sargon explained the significance of this speech in a May 13 tweet.

“Anyone hoping to understand President Trump’s foreign policy should watch his whole speech, probably the most momentous foreign policy address of my lifetime. Trump is building a new world order. I would encourage our allies to watch it closely so as not to miss out on what could turn out to be a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

The central theme of Trump’s “new world order” is promoting global security through trade and prosperity. The president said he favored “commerce, not chaos” and a new Middle East that “exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.”

To facilitate this vision, President Trump noted that the sophisticated and gleaming cities of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were built by visionary Arab leaders who developed their countries in their own ways and consistent with their heritages. He stressed that these countries succeeded due to the hard work of their citizens and not because of Western military intervention, nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Grinding Down The Great Green Grift

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/16/grinding-down-the-great-green-grift/

For Democrats, green policies are a blunt object to be used for taking down capitalism and controlling the economy. They are also a magnificent vehicle for graft. It’s encouraging to see the Trump administration cracking down on the latter.

As his last days in the White House were nearing, Joe Biden, or whoever controlled his autopen, handed out $100 billion in loans and other financial commitments to bolster what’s been called the “Green New Deal wish list.” The funds were dispersed by the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office in the 76 days after Kamala Harris lost the election. To understand how extraordinary and suspicious this was, that same office distributed a little more than $40 billion in its first 15 years of existence, says Energy Secretary Christopher Wright.

“If those were great ideas that were a benefit to America, why didn’t they do it in the two-and-one-half years after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed?” Wright asked last week on a Fox Business segment with Maria Bartiromo. “Why did they wait until they lost the election? They changed terms and loan covenants. They basically tried to set bombs to make it hard for us to unwind the mess they created.”

The answer, which Wright knows, is that it was an act of sabotage but primarily a grift. Democrats are well seasoned in doling out taxpayers’ money to favored groups. There’s no need to think back any further than a couple of months ago when the new administration began to root out the racket known as the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has propped up the Democratic political machine and has the appearance of a criminal organization.

On its way out, the Biden administration also “parked” $20 billion “at an outside financial institution,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said in February. “This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”

It appears the $20 billion was part of the Biden plan to toss “gold bars off the Titanic” to get money to the “right people” before Biden had to leave the White House. Zeldin promised his office would “review every penny that has gone out the door.”

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left, activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Real First 100 Days Trump’s first 100 days mark a chaotic counterrevolution, tackling crises long ignored—and infuriating the very forces that allowed them to fester. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 15th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/15/the-real-first-100-days/

Pundits are confused about what to make of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration.

Supporters talk of “flooding the zone,” believing Trump is making so many changes so quickly that his opposition is reduced to deer-in-the-headlights infancy.

They must be right when the nation suffers daily Democratic pottymouth videos, vandalism of Teslas, infantile meltdowns at congressional witnesses, rioting against federal agents to protect illegal alien felons, protesting on behalf of women beaters, M-13 gangbangers, human traffickers, and assaulters, and visa-holding violent students praising Hamas terrorists.

In contrast, opponents either claim that Trump’s first three months are either directionless chaos or a Hitlerian nightmare or both.

But what is really happening?

One, Trump is finally addressing the problems that proverbially “cannot go on forever, and so they won’t go on.”

When, if ever, would the left have closed the southern border? After 10, 30, 50 million illegal aliens?

How many more criminal illegal entrants was the Biden administration willing to allow into American neighborhoods—500,000? 1 million? 3 million?

How long was the world simply going to ignore the human destruction on the doorstep of Europe?

Would Biden or Harris have sought a ceasefire? Or would it have taken another 1.5, 3, or even 5 million more dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and Russians?

Nor did past administrations ever seek a solution to the massive national debt, much less the uncontrollable budget and trade deficits.

All prior presidents passed the day of judgment on to some vague future presidency, assured that their money printing would at least not blow up on their watch.

All moaned that China was piling up huge trade surpluses while denying its own population the usual modern safety net. They knew Beijing’s aim was to use the trillions of dollars in trade surpluses to build a new massive military, a greater arsenal of nuclear bombs, and a new imperial Belt and Road overseas empire.

Yet no administration did anything but greenlight American outsourcing and offshoring while ignoring Chinese trade cheating and technology theft.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The England We Once Respected by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on May 15th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21622/england-we-once-respected

The future of Israel and its people will therefore rest on Israel’s own ability to defend its nation…

Israelis will live, and thrive, in their homeland despite ill-intent by their enemies. After all, the Jews are sacred custodians of eternal truths and morality – as the Torah makes clear. The world needs them.

“Instead of demonizing and vilifying Israel, the world should be thanking Israel for being on the front lines in saving Western civilization and the free world.” — Elon Gold, reported by David Suissa, The Jewish Journal, April 29, 2025.

As for England and all of Great Britain, the greatest empire of its time is no more — long gone. Rule Britannia no longer rules anything, not even the streets of London.

Since 1650, after a relatively undisturbed period in England of nearly 400 years, publicly expressed animosity toward the Jews is escalating. Islamist influence in Britain is growing exponentially. The UK’s weak leadership falls into a category of cognitive dissonance from reality, as does its cowardly display against vociferous and dangerous Jew-hatred on the streets of London.

Jews have a long history of residence in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, under King Edward I in 1290 CE, England was one of the first countries to expel Jews from its borders — an event which Oliver Cromwell remedied in 1650, after nearly 400 years.

Since 1650, after a relatively undisturbed period in the UK of nearly another 400 years, publicly expressed animosity toward the Jews is escalating. Towards the end of April 2025, a British journalist who frequently appeared on the BBC’s Arabic channel commenting on Gaza events, reportedly called for “Jews to be burned ‘as Hitler did.'” The BBC lamely explained that the person was not “a member of staff nor part of the BBC’s reporting team.” Even so, the BBC – Britain’s official broadcaster – has frequently allowed pro-Palestinian content and, by implication, anti-Jewish sentiment to be promoted.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

ISIS Attack Thwarted at Army Facility Near Detroit, Michigan Kevin Downey Jr.

Posted By on May 15th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/kevindowneyjr/2025/05/14/home-front-alert-isis-attack-thwarted-in-michigan-n4939798

A former National Guard member from Melvindale, Michigan, near Dearborn, was busted for attempting a mass shooting at a base in nearby Warren, Mich.

Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was arrested and charged with providing training and materiel to undercover federal agents. Investigators claim the planned attack is related to ISIS.

The plan was to launch a mass shooting at the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM) facility just north of Detroit. This is not a military base but more of an Army facility.

From the TACOM website:

TACOM, a Major Subordinate Command of Army Materiel Command, manages the Army’s ground equipment supply chain, which constitutes about 60 percent of the Army’s total equipment. If a Soldier drives it, shoots it, wears it or eats it, we sustain it.

BUILDING ARMY READINESS

Our workforce includes highly skilled and uniquely qualified professionals, from engineers and industrial artisans to senior logisticians and business analysts. Our largely civilian workforce is critical to building Army readiness around the world.

Said not only provided ammunition, magazines, firebombs, and weapons training to undercover agents, but he also flew a drone of the TACOM facility while planning his nefarious attack.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why do so many liberals have a blindspot on Jew hatred? Gary Lineker’s sharing of a ‘Zionist rat’ on Instagram confirms the lethal ignorance of the cultural elites. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on May 15th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/14/why-do-so-many-liberals-have-a-blindspot-on-jew-hatred/

I thought Gary Lineker was a dab hand at spotting things that are reminiscent of the Nazi era? Perhaps someone can explain, then, why he shared an ‘anti-Zionist’ Instagram post that was illustrated with the rat emoji. The Jew as rodent, as vermin-like pest, as the lowest and most diseased of Earth’s beasts – it doesn’t get more Nazi era than that, Gary.

Lineker is in hot water after reposting an Instagram story from the anti-Israel campaign group, Palestine Lobby. It was a post featuring a video clip titled ‘Zionism explained in two minutes’. It was the usual Zio-bashing fare that faux-liberal midwits like Lineker mistake for daring commentary. Only it was worse this time, because the post came with a cartoon rodent, twitching its filthy tale.

You don’t need a PhD in the crimes of 20th-century Europe to feel alarmed – and sickened – by such an image. The vile likening of Jews with rats was all the rage in Nazi Germany. Goebbels pumped out propaganda depicting Jews as a rodent race that ‘carry contagion, flood the continent and devour precious resources’. Der Stürmer published cartoons of Jew-rats being exterminated. ‘When the vermin are dead’, one caption said, ‘the German oak will flourish once more’.

Such gross images were central to the Nazi project of dehumanising Jews. For if Jews were rats, then their incineration in the death camps was not a crime – it was ‘pest control’. To see the ‘Jew rat’ make a comeback in 2025 is chilling in the extreme. And I swear, anyone who says the Palestine Lobby post did not liken all Jews to rats, only Zionists, is going to get slapped. You couldn’t ask for better proof that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism in a keffiyeh than the fact that some of its adherents are now even rehabilitating the rat propaganda of that darkest moment in human history.

And then Lineker comes along and shares it. What was he thinking? He says he wasn’t thinking. His agent says he ‘did not notice [the] rodent emoticon’. And if he had noticed it, ‘he would not have made any connection’, the agent says, which I guess means Lineker is unaware of the history of depicting Jews as rodents. He’s deleted it now, his agent tells us. Is it just me or is that an incredibly perfunctory statement? If I had unwittingly shared an image that echoed Nazi propaganda, I’d be a hell of a lot more contrite. I’d at least say sorry. Not our Gary, though. Maybe he thinks it’s no big deal that he reposted a Zio-rat to his 1.2million IG followers.

That Lineker ‘would not have made any connection’ even if he’d noticed the rodent emoticon doesn’t make his repost any better. In some ways it makes it worse. Why doesn’t he know that Jews were compared to rats? If someone on IG had posted a clip slamming Nigerians as the world’s most toxic people alongside an image of an ape, he’d know very well what they were playing at. His ignorance of the long, grim history of caricaturing Jews as vermin is inexcusable, especially given that he’s been wanging on about the Jewish State for 18 months solid. To use a slogan beloved of his class of imperious Remoaner tossers: ‘Educate yourself.’