EDUCATION Comments turned off

Choosing Choice Our ZIP code-mandated education system (Z MES) is rapidly losing favor. By Larry Sand

Posted By on April 23rd, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/23/choosing-choice/

Texas is on the verge of becoming the latest state to embrace educational freedom. On April 17, the Texas House gave final approval to a bill that would create an Educational Savings Account program, bringing Gov. Greg Abbott’s top legislative priority very close to reality. The bill now heads to the state Senate, where it will most likely pass. With ESAs, money is deposited into a government-authorized savings account with restricted but multiple uses. Those funds can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses, and other approved customized learning services and materials.

While any student can apply, the Texas program prioritizes students with disabilities and those from lower-income families. House lawmakers also capped spending for students in families above 500% of the poverty level at 20% of program funds. With over five million students, the program can’t serve everyone at this time. The legislature, however, can appropriate more money for the program in future years.

Also new on the school choice scene is Tennessee, where parents can apply to participate in the state’s new ESA program in May. The program begins in the fall, and parents can access up to $7,295 a year. During the first year, half of the funding would be reserved for students whose families fall below an income limit that is set at 300% of the amount required to qualify for free or reduced-price meals, or $173,160 for a family of four. The other half would have no income restrictions.

Other states are also moving toward parental freedom. In South Carolina, negotiations are underway in the legislature for a program that will accept at least 15,000 students and can increase if the state’s General Assembly allocates additional money. To be eligible, families could earn no more than 300% of the federal poverty level in the first year. The income cap will rise to 500% of the federal poverty level in subsequent years.

Idaho and Wyoming also joined the movement earlier this year, and New Hampshire and North Dakota are taking steps to create universal school choice.

Nationally, 36 states now have some kind of private school choice. Patrick Wolf, a Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas who has studied school choice systems extensively, contrasted the rapid spread of choice over the last few years with the slower progress seen in the 2000s and 2010s. In particular, he said that ESAs stand out as having found their moment.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ivory Tower Hypocrite: Columbia University Israeli professor banned from campus as pro-Hamas riots rage. by Sara Dogan

Posted By on April 23rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-columbia-university/

#2: Columbia University

More than any other university across the nation, Columbia has become a symbol for the lawless riot of Jew hatred and pro-terrorist sentiment that has overtaken our college campuses. And deservedly so.

During the spring of 2024, the Columbia campus became engulfed in chaos, as pro-Hamas students, aided by radical faculty and outside organizers, established an illegal encampment on the South East Lawn, calling it a “Gaza solidarity encampment” and a “liberated zone” and using violence and physical force to deny entry to anyone deemed a Zionist.

As the anti-Semitism watchdog organization, the Amcha Initiative, reports:

The protestors had defended their encampment by encircling it and chanting, “we don’t want no Zionists here,” called for an intifada, and physically intimidated Jewish students that were observing or recording. Professors spoke at a “faculty solidarity teach in,” where Professor Mahmood Mamdani stated, “The response to Zionist power is to criminalize anti-Zionism as antisemitism”… The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine group praised and promoted support for the encampment online, even going so far as to illicit donations for the protestors violating university policy.

As Amcha has documented, “multiple Jewish students were assaulted” in the so-called “liberated zone” and elsewhere on campus: “Protestors off campus threw fake blood at Jewish students. According to the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Workforce, a photographer wearing a ‘bring them home necklace’ had coffee thrown at him by a protester while simply standing nearby. A Jewish student was accosted when walking home wearing a Star of David necklace, and a hostage tag when a woman began screaming at the student, calling the Jewish student a Zionist and a murderer while banging what appeared to be a pot on the barricade, and after being told by a police officer to stop, accused Jewish students of ‘killing her people’ and said ‘We are Hamas’ which was caught on video. A Jewish Columbia student reported to the Committee that many Jewish students ‘who [live] right next to the campus couldn’t sleep due to screams of Intifada until 1AM.’”

The university response to these blatant acts of anti-Semitism and disruption was abysmal. Administrators pleaded and negotiated with the pro-Hamas agitators to disperse the encampment but refrained from taking hard line disciplinary tactics or banning the organizers from campus. As a result, the illegal demonstration persisted, eventually shutting down campus life entirely, forcing the cancellation of graduation ceremonies, and creating a rabidly hostile climate for Jewish and pro-Israel students at the university.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liberal Hypocrites Liberalism is dead and liberals killed it. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 23rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/liberal-hypocrites/

A handful of years after they cheered a president flanked by armed soldiers declaring half the countries to be enemies of the state, liberals are denouncing President Trump as a dangerous authoritarian. The misinformation censors of yesteryear have suddenly discovered that they love free speech and the men who filled D.C. with federal troops worry about the right to protest.

This born-again liberalism fools absolutely no one except the fools virtue signaling it.

The majority of liberals cast aside liberal values, they learned to deplore meritocracy, fair play, freedom of speech and all differences of opinion that did not serve their radical cause. They became leftists who play the cynical game of viewing dissent as either a ‘threat to democracy’ or the ‘highest form of patriotism’ depending on whether they’re the ones in power or dissenting.

That’s not liberalism. It’s a leftist wolf who puts on sheep’s clothing when he’s being hunted.

Liberalism means fundamentally distinguishing between speech and violence. It does not mean, as leftists have come to do, declaring that their violence is speech and that everyone else’s speech is violence. Branding the BLM race riots as the “speech of the unheard”, while also arguing as the New York Times did that, “Free Speech Is Killing Us”, is illiberal totalitarianism.

Free speech isn’t defending the speech you agree with, but the speech you disagree with, and the last time the born-again liberal hypocrites did that was at least a generation ago. The same people who told us that cancel culture was really ‘consequence culture’ are outraged when consequences come for their activists after they spent over a year calling for Death to America.

The cries about the sanctity of academic freedom ring hollow from the establishment that watched conservatives and then even actual liberals and non-conforming leftists being purged from academia until it became a political monoculture. The same liberals now defending campus Hamas riots were fine with campus bans on everything from sombreros to copies of the Constitution. Scrawl a Hamas red triangle and the civil libertarians will jump to your defense who ignored when a campus chalk message in support of Trump was treated like a hate crime.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Press Is Back In Full Frenzy Mode, But This Time Nobody Is Listening

Posted By on April 23rd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/23/the-press-is-back-in-full-frenzy-mode-but-this-time-nobody-is-listening/

You’d think the mainstream press would have learned a lesson or two after committing so many embarrassing mistakes in its effort to “get” Donald Trump and cover up for Joe Biden over the past eight years. But no. It’s already back to its old and terrible habits.

Shortly after the election, Vanity Fair published a story that led with this admonition to the press: “Every outrage and insult can’t be a five-alarm fire, as it’s critical for the media to stay focused on the most serious threats to America’s democratic institutions.”

Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson cautioned her colleagues to “watch and restrain headlines on stories that are needlessly hyperbolic or over-the-top negative.”

Brian McGory, former Boston Globe editor, said it’s “time to cover his actions and policies, his successes and his failures. To do it through as conventional a lens as possible, while not normalizing mayhem, and a willingness to acknowledge when things go well.”

But instead of heeding this advice, the mainstream press went right back to its frantic Trump-hating roots.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The US Must Not Lose the Race for Nuclear Fusion Energy to China by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21570/nuclear-fusion-energy-race

A visionary, an entrepreneur, a futurist, and perhaps one of the most creative of his generation, one still needs to spend considerable time in reading the comments of Elon Musk to determine his current opinion regarding fusion energy.

Prior published interviews suggest he has been a very strong proponent of solar and wind power, energy sources that have brought Europe to its knees economically and that, understandably, are not currently in favor at the White House.

In 2023, Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast that “You could actually power the entire United States with 100 miles of 100 miles of solar.”

Musk did in fact recognize the power of fusion energy but, in this context, he meant the sun generating electricity through solar panels:

“We have a giant fusion reactor in the sky…. the sun is converting more than four million tons of mass to energy every second and requires no maintenance….If you can generate energy from solar panels and store it with batteries, you can have energy 24 hours a day.”

Yet Musk tacitly recognizes a growing strategic fact. The nation that owns the stunning advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) may well hold the technology that dictates who will dominate the rest of the 21st Century. AI consumes an enormous amount of power, so much so that Microsoft is investing in bringing back online the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to ensure uninterrupted electricity to power its AI data centers.

No matter the size of their “farms,” solar panels and wind turbines simply cannot produce enough uninterrupted electricity to protect America’s AI leadership. Consider this quote from a report issued by the International Energy Association:

“In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda (Author), David Broder (Translator), Mark Lilla (Foreword)

Posted By on April 22nd, 2025

In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency. Benda’s essay, published by ERIS in a new translation by David Broder, offers an incisive account of interwar Europe that ranges from the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel to the activities of Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. It also serves, however, as a remarkably timely warning against the seduction of modern intellectuals by tribal loyalties and antipathies.

Rather than detaching themselves from communal ties as their forebears had done, Benda argues that twentieth-century European intellectuals willingly subordinated the disinterested pursuit of truth to the servicing of group interests (particularly the interests of their own nations and social classes). Partisan agendas had a corrosive effect not only on moral and political philosophy, but also on the writing of history and fiction. With its penetrating analyses of nationalism and of the tensions between group identity and intellectual freedom, Treason of the Intellectuals is as necessary a book in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

When Pundits go off Half-Cocked Raff Champion

Posted By on April 22nd, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/when-pundits-go-off-half-cocked/

Almost exactly 100 years ago in France, Julian Benda wrote The Treason of the Intellectuals to challenge the intellectuals to cease and desist from stoking the violent political passions that were dividing the Republic. At present public intellectuals in the quality press have the opportunity to set the example for critical thinking about difficult and divisive issues, à la Benda.

Responsible public intellectuals will engage with the signature issues of the time to establish one or more areas of competence where they have well-informed opinions.  They can provide invaluable guidance on those matters because they have access to the best brains in the country to help them to explain and clarify scientific and technical matters to facilitate informed public debate. If they do their homework in their areas of competence they can be taken seriously, although on other topics they can only recycle what they regard as reliable opinions offered by other people.

Paul Kelly is a leading public intellectual on the basis the circulation of The Australian, his books, and the years that he has spent reading, observing and writing about Australian politics. That is his area of competence, as he demonstrated in his appraisal of the prospects for nuclear power. In The Australian (10/11/2021) he described the idea of conservatives winning an election with a promise of nuclear power as “a grand fantasy” because, he argued, it will take years to achieve bipartisan support at the federal and state levels: “It would never be established amid an energy policy war between the Coalition and Labor.”

Contrast that considered opinion with his position on climate change and net zero. He apparently accepts that the science is settled in favour of warming alarmism despite the empirical evidence that the warming in modern times has been unequivocally beneficial and that we are still short of the temperature during the Roman warm period, which was even more favourable for life on earth.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Is the Jihadist Trojan Horse Winning? By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/is_the_jihadist_trojan_horse_winning.html

Thirteen years ago, Daniel Greenfield pointed out that

Murfreesboro, a city in the heart of Tennessee, and, Marseille, France’s second-largest city and its largest city on the Mediterranean coast, have few things in common. The two cities are separated by nearly 5,000 miles, and by equally wide divisions of language and culture. And yet Murfreesboro and Marseille are connected by a common challenge. Both cities have struggled against the creeping rise of the mega mosques.

The mega mosque business is booming around the world. The Marseille mega mosque has a proposed capacity of 7,000 seats which would make it the largest mosque in France, overshadowing the Ervy mosque which has a mere 5,000 seats. Both of these French mega mosques would have been dwarfed by a proposed London mega mosque with 12,000 seats and usability targets as high as 40,000. If the London mosque is ever built, it will dominate the Mosque of Rome, currently the most mega of all the mega mosques of Western Europe.

At that time, Eric Allen Bell questioned why it was such a big deal “that a Muslim community [was] simply trying to build a house of worship.”  But Bell did wonder “why … a 53,000 square foot mega mosque” was needed for 250-plus Muslim families living in the area at that time.  And, he asked, “where is all this money coming from?” 

Most puzzling, why is it that after the horrific 9-11 attacks, mosque construction in America has nearly doubled?

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ivory Tower Hypocrite: The University of Pennsylvania Anti-Semites welcome on campus; Professor Amy Wax gets suspended. by Sara Dogan

Posted By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-the-university-of-pennsylvania/

When Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was grilled by Congress in the spring of 2024 over pro-Hamas demonstrations and calls for the genocide of the Jews on her campus, she insisted that protecting free speech was a top priority. Magill was blatantly lying. Recent events reveal that the University of Pennsylvania has enforced radically different standards on free expression, depending on who is doing the speaking.

Even before Hamas’s October 7th massacre made pro-Hamas rallies a daily feature of campus life across the nation, Penn demonstrated an extreme tolerance for speech promoting Jew hatred. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.

Featured speakers at the event included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite, who has a penchant for dressing in imitation Nazi garb during performances. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, whose Jew hatred proved too much even for the legacy media. Lamont Hill was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.

The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer. Following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, Abulhawa, rather than condemning the violence against civilians, sought to justify it. “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants,” she wrote. “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”

Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum of Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Great Replacement – and a Great Disgrace Britain bans another truth-teller. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-great-replacement-and-a-great-disgrace/

It’s said that one reason why the British government is so reluctant to address the grooming-gangs horror, so hesitant to cut down on Islamic immigration, and so incapable of expelling even the most dangerous Muslim criminals, is that the government itself has been heavily infiltrated by Muslims. I’m not just talking about the people in high-profile posts, such as Shabana Mahmood, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; Humza Yousaf, First Minister of Scotland; Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London; the dozens of Muslims in Parliament; or the Muslim mayors of Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale, among other cities. I’m also talking about Muslims in the Civil Service and Home Office, in the upper echelons of the police services, Crown Prosecution Services, and other such agencies. And let’s not forget the estimable Sir Hamid Patel, who just last month was named chair of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted).

At first I was reluctant to believe that there are quite so many British Muslims in positions of power as some people maintain. Then something like the following happens, and it seems a hell of a lot easier to believe.

What happened is this: Renaud Camus, the 78-year-old French philosopher, author, and intellectual, was banned from entering the UK. Who, you may ask, is Renaud Camus? Well, back when the world was young, Camus was what the French call a ’68-er – a radical on the barricades, the Gallic equivalent of an American hippie, a bookish lad playing at revolution. He was also a leading figure in France’s gay-rights movement. His 1979 novel Tricks, a chronicle of intimate same-sex liaisons, was a bestseller and a critical sensation. The critic Roland Barthes gave it his imprimatur. Gore Vidal praised it in the New York Review of Books.

But no, Camus isn’t being kept out of Britain because of any of that. Tricks, and the civil unrest of May 1968, are, after all, long ago and far away. Nor is Camus (no relation, by the way, to Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Stranger and The Plague) being punished for having been an active member of the Socialist Party in the 1970s and 80s. How many French intellectuals, after all, weren’t socialists in the 1970s and 80s? Nor is Camus – a man of wide and deep learning – being banned for having accumulated more diplomas than you can fit on a single wall, including degrees in French literature, philosophy, political science, and the history of law.

No, Camus’s offense is having published the 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement), which warned that Europe was undergoing, as the title put it, a great replacement – a massive influx of non-Western immigrants who, owing to early marriages and high reproductive rates, were gradually taking the place of native Europeans who were marrying late, if at all, and, in most cases, having no more than one or two children.