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Ruth King

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Renu Mukherjee Are Universities Following the Supreme Court’s Affirmative-Action Ban? Data suggest that some of America’s top schools may be practicing racial preferences by other means.

By on March 11th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-supreme-court-affirmative-action-racial-preferences

When the Supreme Court, in 2023, banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions, observers expected the number of black and Hispanic freshmen on elite campuses to fall and the number of Asian freshmen to rise. At many schools, however, that didn’t happen.

Admissions data reveal that Yale, Princeton, Duke, and several other highly selective schools enrolled fewer Asian students in their Classes of 2028—the first group admitted since the Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—than they did in their Classes of 2027. Black enrollment at these schools, by contrast, remained virtually unchanged.

In the run up to SFFA, these elite colleges repeatedly asserted that they could not maintain racial diversity on campuses without affirmative action. Sixteen prestigious colleges filed a joint amicus brief arguing that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.” Several had advanced the same argument in amicus briefs filed in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, earlier cases examining the use of racial preferences.

For more than two decades, universities claimed that socioeconomic preferences, geographic sorting, and other race-neutral alternatives could not achieve the same level of racial diversity on campus as could affirmative action. Yet the demographics of many schools’ Class of 2028 suggest otherwise. It raises an awkward question: Did America’s top universities mislead the Supreme Court then, or are they breaking the law now?

Consider data from an Inside Higher Ed database that tracks the demographics of the Classes of 2027 and 2028 at 31 highly selective universities. The database includes the first-year demographics for 13 of the 15 highly selective universities that alleged, in the SFFA amicus brief, that their campuses would lose racial diversity absent racial preferences. I’ve listed the demographics for 12 of those universities below. (The University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania were not included in the database. I chose to omit the California Institute of Technology because its data appeared unclear.)

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

One Fact Missing From Every DOGE Story

By on March 11th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/11/one-fact-missing-from-every-doge-story/

The next time you hear someone complaining that DOGE is “slashing” federal spending or “dismantling” the government, pay close attention. There will almost certainly be an important fact left out: The gargantuan federal deficit.

Every day brings a new sob story about how someone is being hurt by Elon Musk’s chainsaw because some federal program is being shut down, or because a precious federal job has been axed.

Never in any of these is any context provided. And in this case, context is everything.

By the time President Donald Trump took office – four months into the new fiscal year (which started last October), the federal government was already $840 billion in the red. That’s a 58% increase from the prior year.

If all goes well, the deficit for this year will total $1.9 trillion, according to the Treasury Department, which would be the third annual increase.

The result is that the national debt is now $37 trillion – more than double what it was a decade ago. Interest on the debt took off like a rocket under Joe Biden.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Democratic ‘Allies’ Democrats’ obsessive Trump hatred blinds them to their own unpopularity, making his counter-revolution seem inevitable—and even normal. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 10th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/10/trumps-democratic-allies/

Former Clinton strategist James Carville has reinvented himself at age 80 as a sage Democrat podcaster. His predictions—remember, a victorious Kamala Harris?—are usually wrong. He enjoys engaging in public duels with celebrities to gain online clicks and media appearances.

Yet sometimes he appears judicious in his effort to return his party to the Clinton glory days of 1992-2000, before the takeover of the party by the lunatic left. That said, he too has become part of the new left nihilism he supposedly despises.

Most recently, Dr. Carville diagnosed Donald Trump as suffering from tertiary syphilis. Carville’s “proof” was his identification of a bruise on Trump’s much-used shaking hand, along with his supposed brain dementia. As confirmation, Carville described Trump as a “fat f—ing slob” with a “beached whale body.” So, a once top Democratic strategist has gone from his 1992 iconic campaign reminder, “It’s the economy, stupid,” to smearing Trump as a fat slob with syphilis. Carville’s descent sums up his entire party.

Meanwhile, the congressional Democratic opposition finds itself loudly and proudly standing with only 20-30 percent of the American people on matters from biological males competing in female sports to an open border. For years, Democrats claimed the lack of “comprehensive immigration reform” prevented them from securing the border and stopping a 10-12 million influx of illegal aliens. And then they went quiet when Trump, without any new legislation, simply enforced existing immigration statutes and nearly eliminated all illegal entries.

Defeated candidate Kamala Harris is still trying to reassure donors that she did not know how she blew millions of dollars in last-minute 2024 campaign gifts by paying off the likes of Oprah, Al Sharpton, and Cardi B for interviews and endorsements while flying young staffers around the country on rented private jets.

The Democratic Congress under Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jeffries demonstrates their opposition to Trump by cutting videos in which party luminaries promise to stop the “sh-t.” Fellow Democratic congresswomen rivaled them with a worse ad in which they dressed in macho kickboxing attire and clumsily gyrated as if they were punching out their conservative opponents.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Knesset Caucus explores Trump relocation plan as only realistic alternative By David Isaac

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/knesset-caucus-explores-trump-relocation-plan-as-only-realistic-alternative/

The Knesset Land of Israel Caucus, the largest lobby in Israel’s parliament, representing some 80 Knesset members, threw its weight behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza relocation plan during a special conference it hosted in the Knesset on Sunday.

The conference, titled, “The New Middle East: The Plan for Voluntary Migration from Gaza,” featured numerous speakers, both Knesset members and activists.

“It’s amazing how issues that would have sounded completely absurd a few years ago … have today become the consensus,” said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, chairman of the Religious Zionism Party. “We were thought of as crazy, delusional. It turns out that the crazy people are the knowledgeable realists,” he added.

“I was in the United States last week and they asked me on several occasions what I thought about President Trump’s plan. I told them… ‘It’s the only plan that is realistic for peace, for security. The only one—there is no other way,” Smotrich said.

Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana of the Likud Party said that the world had sadly become “accustomed” to the two-state paradigm as the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

He noted the idea had been tested with the 2005 disengagement, in which Israel evacuated some 8,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. Israel was rewarded with terrorism and thousands of rockets fired at its cities, culminating in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.

Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, one of the co-chairmen of the Land of Israel Caucus, and chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, agreed that “those who thought that the Oslo Accords would bring us a new Middle East were doomed to failure from the outset.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Long Shadow of Hillary Clinton Much of the Ukraine problem can be traced back to the failed presidential candidate. by Alan Joseph Bauer

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-long-shadow-of-hillary-clinton/

While one cannot blame all of the world’s problems on the former first lady and senator, much of the trouble in Ukraine is related to her actions.

Volodymyr Zelensky was once a comedian. One of the hallmarks of great comedians is their ability to read the room. When my high school had a very ugly and contentious merger with its sister school (New Trier East and West), a traveling group from Second City came to perform. One of the comedians was asked about the merger, which had made its way into the local papers. He whipped out his Kipling and, without losing a beat, stated, “East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet!” He was met with wild applause by the crowd.

The president of Ukraine did not know how to read the Oval Office on Friday. Zelensky supposedly was coached by Obama retreads Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken and others. If the story is true and they told Ukraine’s president to be tough with Trump, he got some bad advice. One of the strangest features of American governance is the potential for whiplash changes in policy. In dictatorships or even European-style coalition rule, things either remain unchanged or change at a glacial pace. The winner of Germany’s recent elections promised to deal with the problems of large-scale immigration. Once he saw that he could form a coalition without AfD, he said the status quo wasn’t so bad. But not in America. When you change parties, policies can spin around 180 degrees in a second. Somehow, the Obama brain trust tried to convince Zelensky that it was just like the days of Biden, though it was not.

If one wanted to trace a useful starting point for the destruction of Russian and Ukrainian armies, I would suggest the day after the 2016 election. Without evidence, Hilary Clinton and John Podesta claimed that Donald Trump was a Putin stooge and that through Russian interference in the US election, he was elected president. If you could get the ex-secretary of state away from her glass of Chardonnay for a few minutes, she would no doubt repeat the same: the election was stolen from her, and Vladimir Putin was the culprit. These claims had profoundly negative repercussions in the world. The first was the “Russian Collusion” investigation that wasted two and a half years of the Trump administration. Nothing was found, and the millions spent on Robert Mueller’s dream team were wasted, other than it hamstrung the president and supercharged the support, often bipartisan, for Ukraine, a country known for widespread corruption.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tulsi Gabbard Warned About What Was Happening in Syria In fact, anyone could have seen it coming, except the willfully ignorant. by Robert Spencer

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/tulsi-gabbard-warned-about-what-was-happening-in-syria/

During her Senate confirmation hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said this about the situation in Syria at the time: “I have no love for Assad or any dictator. I just hate al-Qaeda. I hate that our leaders cozy up to Islamist extremists, calling them ‘rebels,’ as Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, ‘al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.’ Syria is now controlled by al-Qaeda offshoot HTS, led by an Islamist jihadist who danced in the streets on 9/11, and who was responsible for the killing of many American soldiers.”

At this point, it is abundantly clear that Gabbard was right, and Sullivan was wrong. Al-Qaeda is not on our side in Syria, and the toppling of the Assad regime has not brought “democracy” or peace to the country. Instead, as Greek City Times reported Saturday, “hundreds of Christians, including Greek Orthodox, and Alawites have been killed after clashes broke out on Thursday in the Latakia and Tartous regions on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, according to a human rights monitoring group.”

This was likely an understatement of what was really happening: “The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said on Friday that more than 225 people have been killed since Thursday. However, this is believed to be a gross underreporting, with activists on the ground, such as Coast Youth Forum, believing the death toll could be as high as 1,800, mostly Alawites, but also Christians.”

And so Fox News reported, also on Saturday, that Gabbard’s “warning of a terrorist takeover in Syria looks to be coming true amid reports that al Qaeda-linked terror forces aligned with Syria’s interim new president—a former al Qaeda terrorist—are being accused of massacring Alawites as well as members of the country’s dwindling Christian community.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Net Zero Is A Big Fat Zero For Economic Growth

By on March 10th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/10/net-zero-is-a-big-fat-zero-for-economic-growth/

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions was going to save the planet at no cost. Turns out it’s an economy wrecker, which is more feature than bug for many a climate alarmist.

Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt, a London-based investment bank, took on the claim of Labour Party British Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who said that pursuing net zero greenhouse gas emissions didn’t require a deceleration of economic growth. What he found was “sad to say,” but he stands by the facts.

“The result of the UK’s decarbonization efforts appears to be weak economic growth, stalling living standards, high energy prices and deindustrialization – without denting rising global emissions,” he wrote last week in the Telegraph.

“Net zero is strangling our economy,” says the headline over Pickering’s column, because “limiting available electricity has stifled productivity.”

On the Peel Hunt website, Pickering explained that data from 189 countries indicated there is “a strong positive correlation between living standards and energy consumption – showing a clear link between falling energy capacity and weak productivity in the UK.” He notes that “the decline in UK electricity supply, which started in 2006, coincided with the start of structural weakness in productivity growth.”

Bluntly put, without cheap and reliable energy, which is what we get from fossil fuels, an economy turns sclerotic. Which is why the political left works so feverishly to end gas and oil. As we have said so many times before, the agenda behind cutting greenhouse gases is in actuality an assault on capitalism, which, as the legendary Milton Friedman famously said, is the only economic system that has enabled the masses to escape from “grinding poverty.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gazans Leaving Gaza? By No Means Off the Table P.David Hornik

By on March 10th, 2025

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

President Trump’s talk about a removal of Gazans from Gaza—while transforming the coastal enclave into prime beachfront real estate, a Riviera on the eastern Mediterranean no less—struck many as outlandish. But many in Israel have taken the idea—at least the kernel of it, not necessarily with Trump’s trappings—seriously, and efforts are underway to get it off the ground.

Late last month, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer—close confidant of Prime Minister Netanyahu—reportedly “held a ‘tense’ meeting with a senior Egyptian official…in Jerusalem.” The topic—or at least one of them—was moving Gazans into the vast, sparsely populated Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian official

relayed that Cairo is alarmed by calls from Israeli politicians to push Palestinians into Gaza and stressed that Egypt views any such effort as an existential threat….

According to the sources, Dermer responded by maintaining that the Egyptian people are not as opposed to taking in Gazans as the Egyptian government is.

Alarmed by the answer—in addition to disagreeing with it—Egyptian officials have since sought to arrange a meeting for Dermer with some of the country’s more senior leaders in Cairo in order to further make the case against the relocation of Palestinians into the Sinai.

Unlike Jordan—a small country that already has a large, restive Palestinian population and is under a concerted effort by Iran to undermine its foundations—Egypt has a population of 107 million, while Gaza’s population comes to two million, and no one is suggesting a total population transfer. Egypt’s adamant opposition to taking in Gazans can be seen as a severe case of NIMBYism—even as, of course, Egypt officially intones the proper phrases about the “Palestinian cause.”

For now, Egypt’s President Sissi is turning a cold shoulder to Trump’s overtures for a White House meeting—where Sissi’s NIMBYism just might get exposed to a wide public.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Do Not Be Fooled By Hamas’s ‘Long-Term Ceasefire’ Ploy by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21461/hamas-ceasefire-ploy

As part of the deception, according to the IDF report, Hamas was working to convince Israel that it was interested in calm and was working for economic prosperity. The IDF investigation concluded that Hamas had planned the October 7 attack for more than 10 years.

Today, everyone knows that the talk about a long-term truce was nothing but a smokescreen to conceal Hamas’s real intention of launching its October 7 attack against Israel.

Hamas anyway is not known for honoring ceasefire agreements…. On July 26, 2014, Hamas announced a 24-hour humanitarian ceasefire at 14.00. Hamas violated its own ceasefire a short time later.

For Hamas, a hudna is a temporary break from war — it does not indicate a desire to end it and achieve peace. While Hamas was talking, for ten years before October 7, 2023, about its desire to reach a long-term truce, it was busy preparing for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

It is plainly uninformed to believe that Hamas would ever lay down its weapons and agree to end its jihad (holy war) against Israel.

The Trump administration is advised to listen to what Hamas leaders say in Arabic to their own people, and not what they tell US officials during secret meetings in Qatar. Earlier this month, for instance, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri, speaking in Arabic, reassured his people that his group rejects demands by Israel and the US to disarm…

A ceasefire deal will allow Hamas to remain in power and prepare more massacres against Israel. The only solution for the current crisis is for Hamas to disarm, cede control over the Gaza Strip and leave the Palestinian arena.

Adam Boehler, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, stated on March 9 that he did not rule out the possibility of reaching a long-term truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. He also did not rule out the possibility that Hamas would agree to lay down its weapons, saying:

“I think there’s an answer here, and I think the answer is that Hamas lays down their arms. We exchange prisoners, and they [Hamas] go into a long-term truce, where they don’t fight, they’re not part of any political party, and that gives us lots of cooling-off time.”

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Statesman Among Us by Nils A. Haug

By on March 9th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21457/the-statesman-among-us

The concept of Zionism has received adverse publicity in the press of late, especially thanks to slogans by supposedly pro-Palestinian activists in the West vilifying Jews. These supposedly pro-Palestinian activists are actually just antisemites; they have never proposed a thing that would make Palestinian lives better. Anyhow these activists call Jews “Zionists” to avoid having themselves labelled as Jew-haters.

Due to a fundamental clash of irreconcilable ethical religious principles – that of Torah versus Islamic Sharia – it appears that only Israel’s overwhelming military strength, command of technology and will to protect its country from tyranny can deter the nation’s Islamist enemies.

While combating a hostile local media that support what Netanyahu terms the “deep state”, health issues, personal slights, legal charges — many seemingly politically fabricated in the midst of an existential war by antagonistic state jurists determined to assert their control over elected politicians — Netanyahu presses on, not only on a mission to save Israel from fundamentalist terrorism, but ultimately, by extension, the West itself.

There does not appear to be anyone else in Israel who could have done a better job against the almost inestimable odds than those Netanyahu has been forced to overcome since October 7, 2023.

The words describing the crucial role of Queen Esther of ancient Persia apply equally to Israel’s statesman, Netanyahu: “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

Great statesmen are generally recognized as such only after dire events faced by the nation have settled, and his strategy is seen to have succeeded. Once the threat to the nation has passed and fresh democratic elections eventually arrive, the statesman is often replaced as leader and a new prime minister or president is appointed to lead the nation into a better future – a future created through the efforts, wisdom and courage of his predecessor. This is what transpired with that great British leader, Winston Churchill.

In an effort to avoid the increasing likelihood of war in Europe in 1938, the UK’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, travelled to Munich to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. When Chamberlain returned, victoriously displaying a document signed by both Hitler and himself purporting to resolve the geopolitical issues at stake, hopes were high that the UK could avoid involvement in yet another horrific war so soon after the “Great War” twenty years earlier. Chamberlain proudly, waving the document, declared that the signed paper would guarantee “peace for our time.”

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