EDUCATION Comments turned off

Far beyond Harvard, conservative efforts to reshape higher education are gaining steam By Heather Hollingsworth

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://lite.aol.com/news/story/0001/20250722/635834c9e09e4361f319257ab9fa3724

Ken Beckley never went to Harvard, but he has been wearing a crimson Harvard cap in a show of solidarity. As he sees it, the Trump administration’s attacks on the school echo a case of government overreach at his own alma mater, Indiana University.

Beckley, a former head of the school’s alumni association, rallied fellow graduates this spring in an unsuccessful effort to stop Gov. Mike Braun, a Republican, from removing three alumni-elected members from Indiana University’s Board of Trustees and handpicking their replacements.

No government effort to influence a university — private or public — has gotten more attention than the clash at Harvard, where the Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in federal funding as it seeks a series of policy changes. But far beyond the Ivy League, Republican officials are targeting public universities in several states with efforts seeking similar ends.

“What’s happened nationally is now affecting Indiana,” said Beckley, who bought Harvard caps in bulk and passes them out to friends.

Officials in conservative states took aim at higher education before President Donald Trump began his second term, driven in part by the belief that colleges are out of touch — too liberal and loading up students with too much debt. The first efforts focused on critical race theory, an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is embedded in the nation’s institutions, and then on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Since Trump took office, officials in states including Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Idaho increasingly have focused on university governance — rules for who picks university presidents and boards and how much control they exert over curriculums and faculty tenure.

As at Harvard, which Trump has decried as overly influenced by liberal thinking, those state officials have sought to reduce the power of faculty members and students.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Niall Ferguson: Milei’s Man-made Miracle

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-mileis-manmade-miracle-argentina-economy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson said of the actor David Garrick that his demise “eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.” If the Argentine president Javier Milei were ultimately to fail in his bid to extricate his country from a century of economic underachievement, I would feel the same way. Happily, I don’t think he will.

Since he burst onto the Latin American political scene a few years ago, Milei has added immeasurably to both the gaiety of nations and the public stock of harmless pleasure. With his shaggy sideburns and loopy facial expressions, there is more than a hint of the Mad Hatter about him.

Yet there is a method to Milei’s madness. While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, Milei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.

Consider what Milei has achieved in just a year and a half.

When he was sworn in as president in December 2023, the Argentine economy was a seemingly incurable basket case. In 2023, its gross domestic product had shrunk by 1.6 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Perhaps more strikingly, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) on an inflation-adjusted basis was lower than it had been in 2007. Public finances were in disarray. The last time the government had run a surplus was in 2008. The IMF estimated total public debt at around 90 percent of GDP, but the important thing was how much of that debt—more than $40 billion—Argentina owed to the IMF, the culmination of no fewer than 22 programs.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Columbia University disciplines 70 students as it seeks a deal with Trump Some students received two-year suspensions or expulsions. ByAaron Katersky and Bill Hutchinson

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://abcnews.go.com/US/columbia-university-disciplines-70-students-seeks-deal-trump/story?id=123964822

Columbia University announced on Tuesday that it is disciplining more than 70 students over anti-Israel protests that took over Butler Library on the New York City campus earlier this year and during Alumni Weekend last spring.

The disciplinary action came as the university seeks to work with the Trump administration, which in March accused the school of “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Most of the disciplined students received two-year suspensions or expulsions in the first punishments meted out by the university’s Provost’s Office. The Trump administration is withholding $400 million in federal grants from the university.

Columbia and the administration have been trying to work out a deal to restore the funding.

“Our institution must focus on delivering on its academic mission for our community. And to create a thriving academic community, there must be respect for each other and the institution’s fundamental work, policies, and rules,” the university’s statement said. “Disruptions to academic activities are in violation of University policies and Rules, and such violations will necessarily generate consequences.”

The University Judicial Board (UJB), which was placed under the Provost Office in March, determined the findings and disciplined the students. The UJB panel is comprised of professors and administrators who, the university said, “worked diligently over the summer to offer an outcome for each individual based on the findings of their case and prior disciplinary outcomes.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Buttigieg blew more than half the DOT budget on DEI, failed to make critical air traffic upgrades By Monica Showalter

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/07/buttigieg_blew_more_than_half_the_dot_budget_on_dei_failed_to_make_critical_air_traffic_upgrades.html

Democrat frontrunner for 2028 Pete Buttigieg, is the kind of guy who could give California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom or Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, a run for the money.

Amid news of an aircraft near collision over North Dakota, following a disastrous similar military-civilian crash in Washington, D.C. in January, we learn this about how he ran the cabinet office he headed, the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Steve Guest @SteveGuest

MUST READ: “Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg failed to replace outdated air-traffic-control systems while in office — with his agency instead shelling out tens of billions of dollars on a DEI agenda, according to federal spending records and airline-industry insiders.”

So while he was ‘breast-feeding’ his twins and telling us about his ‘husband,’ what with the move to Traverse City, he was not only not showing up for work during critical supply chain crises (remember that?) when ships backed up to enter ports, or berating airlines for ‘price gouging’ and inefficiencies, he had billions of dollars to play around with and decided to spend it on DEI, not air traffic safety upgrades.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Trump Administration Downsizes the Extravagant Education Department Supreme Court allows staff cuts to proceed. by Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-administration-downsizes-the-extravagant-education-department/

The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to proceed with its downsizing of the U.S. Education Department while litigation on the matter continues in the lower courts. The Supreme Court’s emergency order set aside, at least temporarily, a Biden-appointed federal district court judge’s ruling that had reinstated terminated employees at the department.

The Trump administration has announced the termination of more than 1,300 Education Department workers out of a total of about 4,400, as part of a reduction in force to promote maximum efficiency. After also taking into account some probationary workers who have been let go and employees who have accepted the administration’s offer to resign, about one half the size of the Education Department’s workforce prior to President Trump’s second term still remain.

Judge Myong J. Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, who had issued the reinstatement order, based his decision on the premise that only Congress can legally shut down or eliminate a congressionally-created department, not the executive branch unilaterally. But that is not what happened here.

Downsizing, which still leaves about half of the total number of pre-Trump 2.0 employees in place, is hardly tantamount to shutting down the Education Department altogether. Whether the Trump administration intends in the future, and is authorized, to totally abolish the Education Department and leave its discretionary functions to the states, while still performing its statutorily mandated functions elsewhere in the executive branch, is not relevant to this downsizing case.

The Education Department’s net outlays in fiscal year 2024 totaled $267.9 billion, nearly four percent of total outlays by the federal government. Since 1980, when the Department of Education was established, this department’s spending has increased 371.6% in comparison to an increase of 193.7% in overall federal spending during the same period.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Howard H. Fenn, Kurt Miceli Leading Medical Journals Care More About DEI Than Major Diseases A new report finds that the JAMA Network ran more articles recently mentioning “inequity” than “asthma.”

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/jama-network-science-diseases-dei-inequity

In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann describes wealthy European consumptives who retreat to a sanitorium high in the Swiss Alps, convinced that thin air aids in treating pulmonary tuberculosis. In their self-contained community, they affirm their faith in contemporary medical practices while delaying the demands of life in the “flatlands.”

Medical researchers, it seems, are retreating to a sanatorium of their own. Based on our analysis, leading medical journals increasingly lean left and are abandoning scientific principles in service of progressive ideology.

We began by conducting a keyword search of every article published in the JAMA Network—a group of 13 medical journals affiliated with the American Medical Association—between April 1 and May 31. The phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” appeared 56 times, more often than atherosclerosis (45) and osteoporosis (16). Another progressive-coded term, “inequity,” showed up 99 times—more than asthma (75) or opioid use disorder (65).

POLITICS Comments turned off

More Bad News For Dems — Most Voters Now Call Them ‘Too Radical’: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/23/more-bad-news-for-dems-most-voters-now-call-them-too-radical-ii-tipp-poll/

The Democratic Party’s attempt to “resist” President Donald Trump is backfiring, the latest I&I/TIPP poll shows. A plurality of American adults now believe the one-time party of the center has gone too far to the left.

Voters who responded to the online national poll of 1,421 adults, taken from June 25 to June 27, were asked the following question: “Do you think the Democratic Party has become too radical in its views and policies?”

A strong plurality of 45% of all poll respondents said yes, while 36% said no and another 18% said they weren’t sure. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.7 percentage points.

As would be expected, the question elicited predictable differences among Democrats, Republicans and independent and third-party voters.

Among Democrats, for instance, 64% answered “no,” while 22% said “yes.” Republicans were quite different, as befits the current political schism, with just 16% noes and 73% yesses. Independents were at a 40% plurality for yes, and 33% no, with a hefty 27% not sure.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The mask is finally off: ‘anti-Zionists’ just hate Jews by Michael Deacon

Posted By on July 23rd, 2025

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/22/the-mask-is-finally-off-anti-zionists-just-hate-jews/

What else can we conclude, when activists protesting against Israel scream, ‘F— your Jewish state’?

During an anti-Israel rally in London on Saturday, some participants were heard to scream, “F— your Jewish state”. On the face of it, this may seem alarming. In a way, though, I think we should be grateful to them.

After all, their words should help awaken more people to what so much anti-Israel activism is really about.

Most of the time, anti-Israel activists remember to employ the handy euphemism “Zionist”: a crucial tool in their efforts to persuade the public that they definitely, unequivocally, 100 per cent aren’t anti-Semitic. But on this occasion, it would seem, some of them were so rabidly incensed by the arrival of a small band of pro-Israel counter-protesters, they forgot – and accidentally blurted out what they always really mean: “Jewish”.

Afterwards they must have been kicking themselves. What a careless lapse. Luckily for them, their words don’t seem to have been reported by the Left-wing newspapers that so many of their sympathisers read. But on social media, where users are constantly exposed to stories from newspapers they don’t normally read, there’s a grave danger that the sympathisers will catch sight of the Telegraph’s story, which quoted the words “F— your Jewish state” in the headline. Think how disgusted those sympathisers will be, at seeing the activists so foolishly give the game away.

Of course, this isn’t the first time an anti-Israel activist in Britain has made this unfortunate slip. At a rally held a mere month after October 7, 2023, a speaker disparagingly referred to Suella Braverman’s “Jewish husband” – before hastily correcting it to “Zionist husband”.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Fact Checking The Climate Claims

Posted By on July 22nd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/22/fact-checking-the-climate-claims/

The climate alarmists regularly seize on weather events they believe will help them exploit their narrative. Naturally, they ignore contradictory information. So we see it as our duty to fill in the gaps from time to time. Following are a few examples that show why the global warming story is less scientific theory than conjecture in the service of a political agenda.

Let’s begin in the West Arctic, where the Northwest Passage is experiencing its third-highest level of sea ice extent in the last two decades. In 2009, Al Gore said, with his usual galling listen-to-me certainty, the Arctic polar ice cap could be gone during summer within five to seven years.
There has been “marked cooling since the early 2010s … which is likely linked to a documented slowdown in Greenland’s warming and ice loss,” say a pair of South Korean researchers.
Efforts to attribute the deadly Texas flood, in which the Guadalupe River rose by 37.5 feet, to human carbon dioxide emissions have been debunked (as has every other attempt to tie man’s CO2 to harsh weather). Our friend Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com points out that “much worse flooding had occurred more than a century earlier in July when the Guadalupe River had risen by a whopping 42.3 feet.”
Summer heat is always blamed on man’s fossil fuel use. This year, more than 160 million people in the Midwest, the South, and on the East Coast endured temperatures around the 100-degree mark. But nothing has happened to indicate that man is responsible. Have a look at the data.
Last month, H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute noted that polar ice has refused to follow the climate crisis narrative. “Having examined the data and history, I knew Antarctica has not been following the climate crisis script since the alarm was first raised with James Hansen’s theatrically staged 1988 congressional testimony in which he claimed the Earth was dangerously warming due to human activity.”
Last month, a Tampa, Fla., meteorologist blamed “climate change,” and we don’t assume he’s talking about natural variations that have always existed, for 90-degree days having doubled in the city. He was fact-checked by the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow: “Tampa does not represent the rest of Florida. The average number of days reaching 95°F (35°C) or higher in Florida has not increased since 1895,” according to federal data. “Tampa’s temperature data has been contaminated with urban heat island effects, which have led to an artificial rise in the number of extremely hot days.”
The New York Times wants readers to believe that the June Air India crash that killed 241 is a curtain-raiser for future air crashes caused by climate change. Milloy had the best response: “No other plane crashed because of global warming. Just that one.”

If the climate tale were undeniably true, the activists in and out of the media would not have to exaggerate, disinform, and make connections that don’t exist. The fact that they feel they have to provides a clear insight into their duplicitous nature.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“Our Revolutionary Origins & Today’s Paternalism” Sydney Williams

Posted By on July 22nd, 2025

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations… This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”

Letter from John Adams to Hezekiah Niles February 13, 1818

                                                                                                             In this year of the semiquincentennial of our Declaration of Independence, have we swapped individual independence for dependence on government paternalism?

Threats to democracy, a current rallying cry of the Left, have been a constant since our founding. They have come from both the right and the left. They fade, however, when exposed to unfettered free debate, and an unbiased study of the classics and our history. Today, supported by main-stream media, the Left puts the blame for such threats square on Republicans, especially those of the MAGA variety. Disallowing dissension, they wave their hands, and with crocodile tears flowing and with Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress they cite the deportation of illegal migrants, including those with criminal records, piggish billionaires, corrupt corporations and cuts to government services. It is ironic that Mr. Trump is accused of being authoritarian, when his attempts to reduce the size of government are at odds with Democrats who prefer a larger, more paternal government.

Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ ninety years ago, through Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ in the 1960s, to Barack Obama’s ‘Cradle to Grave Care’ thirteen years ago, the United States has moved irrevocably toward a more paternalistic state. My point is not to argue that all federal welfare programs are wrong and should be abolished, but to point out that major entitlement programs consumed about 50% of the 2023 federal budget and are growing faster than all other programs. With total federal debt at $36.6 trillion and rising, interest expense already consumes over 13% of the federal budget, entitlement programs will be unaffordable for future generations. As well, some programs discourage aspiration, hard work, self-sufficiency and independence. Welfare reform is badly needed.   

While I keep a skeptical eye on MAGA Republicans, Democrats should look in the mirror as regards threats to democracy. Their demand for conformity can be seen in the expanding interest in Socialism, the ultimate in paternalism. From Bernie Sanders in the Senate to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House, Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) has risen from the ashes of the early 20th Century Socialist Party of America. Nine years ago the DSA was formed with a small number of adherents. Today it has 90,000 members, including an aspiring candidate for mayor of New York City, a young man who followed a privileged path to power. Socialists oppose capitalism and the personal freedom that allowed the talented and aspirant, regardless of economic and social class, to rise in our country – the magnets that attract so many to our shores.