ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Nicole Gelinas New York’s Unsettling Mayoral Race Whatever the outcome in November, the city will get (another) highly flawed leader.

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-mayoral-race-candidates-voters

Just after midnight on June 25, with the temperature finally down from a 100-degree high to the upper 80s, a hoarse and exhausted-looking Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani addressed a cheering crowd in Queens. Clad in a crisp white shirt under his dark suit and tie, the 33-year-old exulted: “My friends, we have done it. I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.” Indeed, Mamdani had done it—an upstart Democratic Socialists of America member with four years’ experience in office had pulled off a stunning victory in the city’s mayoral primary. From just 7 percent support in January polls, he surged to defeat former governor Andrew M. Cuomo by eight points. Cuomo, backed by tens of millions of dollars from business and real-estate interests and long leading in polls, had expected an easy path to the nomination. The result was the biggest political upset in New York in nearly 25 years—since Michael Bloomberg, running as a Republican after 9/11, edged out Democratic favorite Mark Green as voters chose a businessman over a party stalwart.

It’s understandable that New Yorkers, and observers nationwide, see Mamdani’s victory as a sharp break in city politics. Going back more than three decades, voters have elected pragmatic leaders focused on public safety and economic growth. The exception, Bill de Blasio, benefited from the safety and prosperity created by his immediate predecessors. But the reality is less dramatic: Mamdani won not because voters embraced his self-described socialist agenda of government-run grocery stores and free buses, but because the alternatives were so weak. New Yorkers didn’t reject a centrist—they simply weren’t offered a credible one.

To understand the failure of Mamdani’s rival candidates to inspire, it’s worth looking back at the primary campaign, which began in January and played out across countless forums.

On a Tuesday evening in late May, veteran New York politico Scott Stringer sat in his Manhattan living room, peering into his laptop camera. He spoke confidently and capably about an issue affecting New Yorkers rich and poor: illegal noise. Whether from unpermitted construction or raucous park parties, Stringer argued, noise isn’t just a nuisance, it’s a health hazard—and he proposed enforcement solutions.

One problem: this Zoom forum, hosted by the NYC United Against Noise citizens group, drew fewer than a dozen attendees. The dismal turnout underscored the challenge that New York’s career state and local politicians faced this spring in a long, strange city election: voters barely noticed them. Stringer’s résumé was solid: lifelong Manhattanite, teenage community-board member, two decades in the state assembly, eight years as Manhattan borough president. Most notably, in 2013, he won a citywide election for comptroller against a formidable, well-funded opponent—former governor Eliot Spitzer.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Persistent Presence of Absence The public school exodus continues unabated. by Larry Sand

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-persistent-presence-of-absence/

The fact that many children are ditching America’s public schools is undeniable. Most recently, Nat Malkus, Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, reported that while chronic absenteeism spiked during the COVID pandemic, it remains a serious problem. In 2024, rates were 57% higher than they were before the pandemic. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

Malkus goes on to explain that in 2018 and 2019, about 15% of K–12 public school students in the U.S. were chronically absent—a number so high that numerous observers and the U.S. Department of Education are labeling it a “crisis.”

In total, nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline over the last five years

The problem is especially egregious in our big cities. In Los Angeles, more than 32% of students were chronically absent in the 2023-2024 school year.

In Chicago, dwindling enrollment has left about 150 schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity.

Additionally, schools identified by their states as chronically low-performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other public schools.

In February 2025, FutureEd disclosed that data from 22 states and the District of Columbia for the 2023-24 school year show significant differences across grade levels, with absenteeism particularly severe in high school.

“In most states, 12th graders have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism, often far exceeding state averages. In Mississippi, for example, the overall absenteeism rate was 24%, but among seniors, it soared to 41%. Several other states have senior absenteeism rates above 40%, with rates in the District of Columbia and Oregon exceeding 50%.”

FutureEd also reports that kindergartners have disproportionately high rates of chronic absenteeism.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Social Media Campaign Targets ‘Ivory Tower Hypocrites’ By Sara Dogan

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/social-media-campaign-targets-ivory-tower-hypocrites/

Over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have become cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting opinion is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.

Yet in the wake of rising anti-Semitism, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.

The Freedom Center’s Spring 2025 Campus Campaign targeted these elite universities and their leaders as “Ivory Tower Hypocrites” in a published report and a wide-reaching social media campaign.

“At far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views,” explains the report.

Universities named in the report include UCLA, Columbia, UPenn, Georgetown, Wake Forest and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, among others. These schools allowed woke leftist activists to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views.

Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill defended a blatantly anti-Semitic Palestinian literature festival on campus, claiming to “fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission” but persecuted conservative law professor Amy Wax for declaring that sex is binary and airing the inconvenient truth that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Great President Trump’s Worst, Terrible, Bad Idea Ever by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21723/the-great-president-trump-worst-terrible-bad-idea

Qatar’s job, if it is part of a consortium controlling the Gaza Strip, will be to make sure that the jihad against Israel continues.

If Egypt is in any way involved in securing the Gaza Strip, it is certain there will be renewed smuggling of weapons and terrorists into Israel through and under the Rafah Crossing. The weapons-and-terrorists industry has always been far too profitable and far too successful at attacking Israel just to give up.

Trump’s original plan to make Gaza an American Riviera, together with Israel — or Israeli sovereignty by itself — is a far more dependable way to guarantee security. It is, in fact, the only way to ensure that Israel can either defend itself, or has a US shield nearby to deter aggression — the same way the US stations the forward HQ of Central Command and Air Forces Central Command at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, to protect its survival.

There were rumors this week that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas might ultimately include a consortium of Arab countries taking charge of the Gaza Strip.

Unfortunately, hardly anything could be more dangerous than that for the stability of the region. A consortium of Arab countries governing the tiny strip of land next to Israel is, in fact, is a sure-fire recipe for a monstrous conflict just around the corner. This plan will make all the breathtaking achievements of US President Donald J. Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the great US Air Force and the Israel Defense Forces be for naught.

The problem: If a consortium of Arab countries controls the Gaza Strip, one of those countries is bound to be Qatar. Qatar will no doubt make sure of that. One of Qatar’s main reasons for existing is to make sure that radical Islamic organizations stay active and well-funded. It is hard to think of an Islamist terrorist group that has not been a large beneficiary of Qatar — from ISIS, to al-Qaeda, to the Taliban, not to mention Hamas.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

This is an anti-fascist Forget the bigots of Glastonbury – it’s the heroic IDF soldier, Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld, we should be talking about. Brendan O’Neill *****

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/30/this-is-an-anti-fascist/

The name we should remember from this weekend is not Bob Vylan. Or Pascal Robinson-Foster, to give the Israelophobic punk who caused such a stink at Glastonbury his real name. No, it’s Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld. For as Bob Vylan was whipping the smug mob of Glasto into a frenzy of violent loathing for the IDF, this young IDF soldier, himself a Brit, was laying down his life for the Jewish people. He was killed in Gaza on Sunday as he did battle with that army of anti-Semites, Hamas. Now that’s anti-fascism.

Natan – as he was known – was 20 years old. He was born in London and moved to Israel 11 years ago. He was a sergeant in the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion of the IDF. He was killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza. His sister’s boyfriend, also an IDF soldier, died in combat during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Natan’s father paid tribute to him this morning. He was fighting ‘for his parents, his family, his people’, he said. ‘I feel he has a place in history.’

This is the Briton we should be talking about – not the sozzled, moneyed brats of Glastonbury who got a sick thrill from chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF’, but this fresh-faced warrior against Islamofascism. Not that Bob Vylan faux-punk who hollered for the death of the Jewish State’s soldiers, but this soldier of the Jewish State, this British Jew just out of his teens, who ventured into enemy territory to fight the Islamists who butchered so many of his people. Not the fake anti-fascists of Britain’s wet, vain left, but this real anti-fascist who put his life on the line for the Jewish homeland.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

John D. Sailer Cornell’s Racialist Hiring Scheme The university’s FIRST program mandated “diverse” lists of finalists.

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/cornell-university-hiring-race-first-program

At Cornell University, faculty search committees adopted a series of checkpoints to ensure that job candidates were sufficiently “diverse.” Internal documents I’ve reviewed raise questions about whether the university unlawfully used racial preferences in hiring—and offer a revealing look at the tactics of Cornell’s social-justice advocates.

In 2021, Cornell received $16 million from the National Institutes of Health to help start its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, aimed at increasing the faculty’s “compositional diversity” by hiring ten new professors. According to the program’s grant proposal and progress reports, its leadership team screened applicants at four stages—the initial pool, longlist, shortlist, and finalist slate—to ensure “as diverse a pool as possible.” These checkpoints aligned with the program’s stated objective: “Cornell University aims to increase the number of minoritized faculty in the biological, biomedical, and health sciences through establishing an NIH FIRST Program at Cornell University.” The university pledged to hire the ten new professors specifically from “groups underrepresented in their fields.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. Had Cornell restricted these faculty positions to certain racial groups, it would have plainly violated the law. The Cornell FIRST program was more subtle, prioritizing diversity throughout the search process rather than at the final hiring stage.

Still, the program’s carefully structured, four-stage process—explicitly designed to shape the racial composition of the candidate pool—raises legal concerns. “Each search will be governed by a clear process and 4 checkpoints,” the FIRST proposal notes, “to ensure that the search has as diverse a pool as possible.” The process is described step by step.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The ‘Wind Scam’ of Wind Turbines “There’s nothing clean about this.” by Rachel Alexander

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wind-scam-of-wind-turbines/

Media personality and former Trump campaign operative Steve Cortes has released a video exposing the flaws of using wind turbines as an energy source, which he calls the “wind scam.” Filmed in New Mexico, which generates 38% of its electricity from wind, he revealed how wind turbines still need petroleum to function, and they’re bad for the environment, especially animals. Studies estimate 140,000 to 679,000 birds die annually in the U.S. due to them.

“They are one gigantic, expensive scam,” Cortes said. “There’s nothing clean about this,” they stated, as they cause pollution.

He showed a clip from the show Landman that went viral, featuring actor Billy Bob Thornton going off on a rant about wind turbines. Oil companies own them, Thornton said. He said they need a lot of oil for lubrication and winterizing. Additionally, “In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it.” Thornton listed off multiple items in society that need oil, from everyday products to roads.

Cortes said the only thing Thornton got wrong was stating that we’ll run out of fossil fuels before we are capable of switching fully to clean energy.

Paul Gessing of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation spoke to Cortes about the dilemma. He said the Navajo Nation makes money from their natural gas reserves, but unfortunately lawmakers are trying to end this profitable venture for them. Gessing said wind turbines have a “devastating environmental impact” and leave “a huge footprint.”

Cortes criticized “oligarchs like Al Gore, who grew generationally rich off of selling us this giant myth.” He explained that “wind is by definition unreliable, even in the windiest places on the planet,” which “tend to be geographically very far away from the biggest energy consuming needs.” Cortes said wind cannot serve as a sole source of energy or even a primary source, it always comes down to coal or natural gas for the default system.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

SCOTUS Curbs Abuse of Power by Activist District Court Judges Nationwide universal injunctions can no longer undermine Trump’s mandate. by Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/scotus-curbs-abuse-of-power-by-activist-district-court-judges/

On June 27th, the Supreme Court struck a significant blow against the tyranny of progressive federal district court judges who have used nationwide universal injunctions to tread on the authority of the Executive Branch. Multiple activist district court judges in mostly liberal jurisdictions have taken it upon themselves to bar the government from implementing President Trump’s executive orders anywhere in the nation. These judges have not limited the relief they granted only to the persons or entities who were parties to the original lawsuit. The universal injunctions were designed to provide relief to nonparties as well.

As a result, President Trump’s executive orders have been blocked nationwide on policy matters ranging from downsizing the Executive Branch and cutting federal spending to deportation and barring transgender males from competing in female sports.

Writing the opinion for a 6-3 majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained that such nationwide universal injunctions issued by individual district court judges “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” The Court ruled that “The Government’s applications to partially stay the preliminary injunctions are granted, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”

The underlying dispute that prompted this case involved the extent to which President Trump’s executive order prohibiting birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants’ babies born on U.S. soil violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. However, The Supreme Court did not reach a decision on the merits of this constitutional issue, which remains to be resolved at another time. The majority in this case focused on the threshold issue of whether individual district court judges have the extraordinarily broad authority to grant plaintiffs’ requests for unrestricted nationwide universal injunctions against implementation and enforcement of executive orders. Justice Barrett’s majority opinion concluded that these judges do not have the authority to grant “such a sweeping remedy.”

RELIGION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The West Still Doesn’t Get Islam We must be careful not to succumb to magical thinking. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-west-still-doesnt-get-islam/

The spectacular destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure by Israel and the U.S. is a long-neglected restoration of America’s deterrent power. Yet the subsequent cease-fire President Trump imposed on Israel bespeaks again the West’s long failure to understand the nature of traditional orthodox Islam–– particularly its sanctified violence in fulfillment of Allah’s command to wage religious war “Until,” as the Islamic Republic’s godfather, the Ayatollah Khomeini, announced, “the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.”

Nor was this sentiment a modern deformation of Islam in response to Western imperial aggression. One of the most significant Islamic exegetes, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”

This jihadist imperialist ambition guided Islamic conquests and occupations of lands that had been Christian for millennia, and remained a threat to the West up to Europe’s expansion into Muslim lands began to accelerate in the 18th century.

But the rise and spread of secularism in the West diminished the influence of religion, which once was the heart of our understanding of human affairs and change. By the late Thirties, Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc observed, “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.”

These changes over multiple decades also profoundly impacted Islam, and incited calls for reformation: “From the beginning of Western penetration in the world of Islam,” Middle Eastern historian Bernard Lewis writes, “until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Buried News: President Trump ends Africa’s deadliest war By Wendy Kinney

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/06/buried_news_president_trump_ends_africa_s_deadliest_war.html

A thirty-year war. Over six million lives lost. Entire villages erased. Generations destroyed by the silent carnage that the world chose to ignore. But in the wake of mounting atrocities in Kasanga and Beni, and after months of quiet diplomacy, the silence has finally been shattered.

Today, something happened that the United Nations never accomplished. Something the European Union only debated. Something the Biden administration didn’t even attempt.

President Donald J. Trump brought peace to Central Africa.

After decades of devastation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), fueled by regional proxy warfare with Rwanda and the brutality of militias like M23, the unthinkable has occurred: a signed peace agreement. Rwanda and the DRC, after thirty years of war and unfathomable loss, have reached a ceasefire. And it was President Trump who brokered the deal.

This is not a footnote. This is one of the most significant diplomatic achievements in modern African history. It didn’t come from the echo chambers of Brussels or the empty chambers of the United Nations. It came from action. Resolve. Leadership.

The world has long turned a blind eye to what happened in the DRC. Since the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, eastern Congo has become a graveyard of the innocent. Militias, backed at times by foreign actors, ravaged the land. M23 rebels, in particular, carried out atrocities across North Kivu, Ituri, and the Kasai provinces.

The death toll surpassed six million. That number is staggering. It eclipses nearly every modern conflict, yet barely registers in Western headlines. Even as late as Holy Week this year, the world was silent as Christians were massacred in Kasanga and Beni.

But President Trump noticed.