Read it.

A Denver high school allows students to take classes such as Queer Literature and Gender Studies to earn a “Seal of Diversity” award.

Students can submit a short, five-minute application to be part of the program, then take “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-related classes and engage with a DEI-related club or organization on campus to receive the award, according to documents obtained by The Daily Signal through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

“This award, to me, represents who we are, and should all aspire to be at East [High School], and I’m so proud of how many of you live that every day,” social studies teacher Dylan Fehrman said to members of the program in a message on March 23, 2023.

The Colorado Parent Advocacy Network told The Daily Signal it’s calling for an investigation into the classes, lesson plans, books, articles, and other materials used in the Seal of Diversity program.

Read it.

A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.

Matthew Garrett, formerly a tenured history professor at the California community college, will receive $2,245,480 divided into monthly payments for the next 20 years as well as an immediate one-time payment of $154,520 as “compensation for back wages and medical benefits since [his] dismissal,” according to the July 10 settlement agreement.

Also under the terms of the settlement, Garrett agreed to resign from his job with the Kern Community College District. Administrators, in turn, have withdrawn and sealed any and all accusations and reports accusing him of “unprofessional conduct.”

Read it.

Jamiee Michell, a lesbian who founded the organization Gays Against Groomers, finds it ironic and “hilarious” that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands her openly LGBTQ group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”

“It classifies us as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which is the most ironic and hilarious thing ever because everybody in our organization is gay and we even have a few trans people,” Michell tells The Daily Signal in an interview at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.

She says the SPLC, Anti-Defamation League, and other liberal organizations “labeled us anti-ourselves just for speaking out, wanting to protect children.”

Read it.

As people grow increasingly wary of dangers around them, a split-screen has again opened up on how the Left and Right approach the threat of terrorism. On the Left, you have the Army being trained on the purported terrorist threat posed by Christian pro-lifers. On the other, elected officials are finally probing pro-Hamas groups.

The pro-life groups presented as terrorist threats to U.S. Army soldiers were National Right to Life and Operation Rescue, two Christian-based groups with zero history of violence. The pro-Hamas groups that Republican state and federal elected officials want probed organized violent protests in U.S. campuses and cities to advocate Hamas, a Gaza-based Iranian proxy group that the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization.

Read it.

Big tech’s crackdown on “gunfluencers” is nothing new, but policies at social media companies are becoming increasingly restrictive (read: here), leading to the demonetization of numerous channels. The latest victim of this aggressive censorship isn’t even the typical gun YouTuber but instead a competitive rifle shooter on Team USA for the Paralympics.

Just The News reports that McKenna Geer, a competitive rifle shooter, had her Instagram account censored before she heads to Paris for the Paralympic Games in late August. Next week, the Olympic Games are set to begin.

Nature.

You can’t make this shit up.

Read it.

When Google and YouTube first announced that they would be demonetizing a host of channels back in 2017 (including firearms related content) they said is was because advertisers were “complaining” about their ads being featured in videos that were contrary to their messaging. In other words, the excuse was that ads embedded on firearms channels might give their customers the “wrong impression” about those companies and their products, and Google didn’t want to anger their advertising partners.

It’s hard to say how accurate this claim was. The exposure of ESG and Big Tech collusion with government agencies to censor conservative platforms supports the idea that there was probably an organized corporate push to suppress the political opposition on YouTube as much as there was an effort to shut them down on social media.

The majority of conservative content creators understood that this was not about advertisers, it was about narratives. The exploding popularity of gun channels runs contrary to the media assertion that American society is moving increasingly to the left. And, even though gun channels mostly focus on firearms and instruction, they also promoted conservative and constitutional values which represent a thorn in the side of the establishment.

More proof has surfaced that randomized advertising and company complaints were never the issue. Gun related channels are reporting that Google/YouTube is not only demonetizing them, they are also no longer allowed to feature private sponsors that market gun related products.

Read it.

So, the truth has come to light: the European Commission offered social media platforms secret illegal deals in the run-up to the recent European elections, that if they censored speech without telling anyone, they would be immune from prosecution under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

This claim, made by X owner Elon Musk in a tweet on Friday, in which he revealed X had refused to cooperate with the deal but that Facebook and Google had, is extraordinary. It is remarkable because, throughout the recent elections, Brussels was constantly warning of Europe being under threat of fake news, disinformation, and hate speech emanating from Russia, while in reality, European citizens were under attack from the anti-democratic and hateful censorious attitude of EU elites.

Musk has exposed the arrogant hypocrisy of the Brussels elite and their so-called allegiance to defending European values like democracy and free speech.

Geez, you’d think they were Democrats or something.

Read it.

“The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” That headline in a recent column in the New York Times warned Americans of a menace lurking around them and threatening their livelihoods and very lives. That menace is free speech and the media and academia are ramping up attacks on a right that once defined us as a people.

And these are people calling Trump the ‘New Hitler’. I think Adolf would recognize them before anybody.

Jonathan Turley.

If Democrats are looking for The New Hitler, all they have to do is cast their eyes on the White House.

Read it.

Columbia University announced it is removing three deans who sent antisemitic texts, calling them “upsetting.”In a letter, President Minouche Shafik said the texts were sent during a reunion weekend entitled “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present and Future,” in May.

UPDATE: Moving the Priests Around: Columbia To Reassign Deans at Center of Texting Scandal

Read it.

In an odd tactical decision, the Biden-Harris campaign has chosen to demonize the Heritage Foundation and tie that organization to Donald Trump. Heritage has published the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. It is a compendium of recommended conservative policies, intended to be “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.”

Donald Trump has nothing to do with the Heritage Foundation, and had nothing to do with Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. Some of the policies recommended by Heritage, such as free trade, reduced tariffs, and nationwide limitations on abortion, are at odds with Trump’s policies. Nevertheless, the Biden campaign finds it worthwhile to demonize Heritage:

First of all, Heritage has produced a document of over 800 pages. Ain’t nobody got time for dat. And it says nothing about immigration, so it is just the same old Crustian bullshit.

Secondly, this sort of thorough transition preparation is something that Democrats are good at and Republicans suck at, which is why we’re in the pickle we’re in right now, and why Trump’s first administration got so little done. One of the things they did get done, of course, was in the area of judicial nominations, including the current kick-ass Supreme Court, and that was the result of efforts by the Federalist Society. So the assistance of such think-tank organizations can be significant … if Trump allows it to be. And that’s why the Democrats are trying so hard to step on it. My rule of thumb is that if Democrats hate something, it’s probably the right thing to do.

Read it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Monday issued a vow to file articles of impeachment after the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, which she described as “an assault on American democracy.”

More Trump Derangement Syndrome:

The Supreme Court Puts Trump Above the Law (The Atlantic)

The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially (The Nation)

Van Jones: ‘MAGA Hats’ SCOTUS Just Gave Presidents a ‘License to Thug’

ABC Panics SCOTUS Case Is ‘Absolute’ Win for Trump; ‘Hard to Square’ With Constitution

The Other McCain.

We’re living in a 21st-century Salem, and the folks who want to hang witches all claim to be “progressive.” Basically anybody who votes Republican nowadays is suspected of witchcraft — “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi”! — and whatever actual danger there may be from such extremism is obscured by the hysterical paranoia of self-appointed witch-hunters like Casey Newton.

If everybody is a Nazi, nobody is Nazi. If you start exaggerating the extent of extremism by expanding the definition to include anyone you disagree with, don’t pretend that your diminished credibility is anyone’s fault but your own. That’s basically what happened to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which began putting dots on its annual “Hate Map” to represent alleged threats that reasonable people might doubt were very harmful. One of the tricks the SPLC employed was to list every local chapter of, e.g., the Eagle Forum as a separate “hate group.”

David Frum carries a tanker full of water for the Left.

The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency again.

You’d never know that this guy (like his fellow sell-out, Conor Friedersdorf) was once an intern at National Review.

Hm. Well, maybe you would….

Read it.

A CDU politician in Germany is under investigation for hate crimes after he reacted to a knife attack by an Afghan migrant by calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals from the country.

Read it.

The editor-in-chief and publisher of The Tennessee Star was ordered to appear in court last week and threatened with charges of contempt after his newspaper reported on an anonymously leaked collection of documents authored by Nashville mass shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale. Michael Patrick Leahy was joined by his attorneys in court on Monday for a “show-cause hearing,” where the journalist was asked by Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles to demonstrate why his outlet’s reporting does not subject him to contempt proceedings and sanctions.

On March 27, 2023, Hale (born Audrey Elizabeth Hale) entered the Covenant School armed with three semiautomatic guns and murdered six people, including three 9-year-old children. Hale, who was eventually shot and killed by police in the school, was a transgender man and former student at Covenant who harbored extremist sentiments on race, gender, and politics. The massacre remains the deadliest mass shooting in Tennessee history.

Adam Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told RealClear last week that there is no legal basis whatsoever on which Myles can pursue contempt proceedings against Leahy. “It has not been alleged by anyone to date that the Star or Leahy did anything unlawful to obtain this information,” Goldstein said, speaking of the leaked documents, “or that the information was not basically accurate as published.” Reporting on leaked documents, however they were obtained by a source, is an essential journalistic practice protected by U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Can you say “Pentagon Papers”? I’m sure you can.

Read it.

Study comparing the genetic activity of mitochondria, the cell’s power plants, in males and females finds extreme differences, suggesting certain disease therapies must be tailored to each sex.

Oops–this will get you cancelled by the Wokerati for the ThoughtCrime of Noticing.

Read it.

A German woman reacting to the vicious gang rape of a 15-year-old by ten predominately migrant men is set to spend a weekend behind bars for alleged “hate postings” made over WhatsApp to one of the attackers.

The gang rape was perpetrated in September 2020 in a prominent public park in Hamburg, with the ten men, ranging from 16 to 20 years old, taking advantage of the teen’s inebriated state and the lack of witnesses due to ongoing lockdown measures.

The nature of the gang rape, as well as the fact it was organized over a group chat, attracted particular horror in the courtroom and the popular press.

German press reports that five of the ten men were non-German nationals, including from Afghanistan and Syria, with all of the attackers of non-German extraction. Only one of the men found guilty at the trial was given a prison sentence—of two years and nine months. The rest of the attackers were given mild community service and suspended sentences.

Read it.

The people pushing the “energy transition” in New York and elsewhere claim a foundation in science, but proceed with religious fervor. A key element of the playbook is never to engage with people asking legitimate questions, who are generally dismissed out of hand as “deniers.” But every so often one of the team will break the code of silence, thus giving us some insight into the thought process behind the campaign to transform our energy supply.

In New York, the most important academic guru behind the Climate Act and energy transition is a Cornell professor named Robert Howarth. Howarth is a professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology. Based on that background, he would seem to have nothing to offer on the subject of the engineering of an electrical grid. But Howarth has a burning desire to save the planet, and he has read some work by trendy Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, and has become convinced that putting together a zero-carbon electricity grid is no problem. Despite his total lack of relevant expertise in grid engineering, he has somehow gotten the ear of the New York State legislature and bureaucracies on that subject.

Read it.

Over the weekend, The Daily Telegraph published an article which revealed that almost “£1.5 million in taxpayer funding has been awarded to a research project that aims to ‘decolonise’ folk singing.” Such research is surprisingly typical within universities at least in one respect, namely that the funding is awarded on the grounds that the conclusion of the research is determined long before any research begins. Hence, in no way can this be understood as scholarship, but rather it possesses both the form and the content of propaganda, and for a particular kind of regime.

I guess Hearts of Oak and The Roast Beef of Old England are not long for this world.

Read it.

The transgender movement’s cultural Blitzkrieg swept the elite institutions of the West in less than a decade, but their hold on the public imagination has always been far more tenuous. It is one thing to get academics and activists to believe that the phrase “her penis” makes perfect sense; it is quite another to condition ordinary people into believing that. Consequently, the transgender movement has attempted to enforce their agenda by government totalitarianism on one side, and street-level violence on the other.

This is not hyperbole. Vassilis Tsiartas, widely considered to be one of the greatest Greek soccer stars of all time, was convicted in 2022 of “transphobic” social media posts and given a 10-month suspended prison sentence and 5,000 euro fine for “violence or hatred for reasons of gender identity.” Norwegian filmmaker and actress Tonje Gjevjon was criminally investigated for stating that men cannot be lesbians; her compatriot, the feminist Christina Ellingsen, was investigated for saying that men cannot become women.

Read it.

San Francisco United School District’s LGBTQ Student Services department offers guidance on “Changing Your Name and/or Gender” in the district’s systems. The document offers a note “for students to think about,” recommending they wait to change their in the school records if they are not ready for their parents to find out their gender identity.

“Remember that your caregivers have the right to check out some of your school files, Google Classroom, or may end up on a Zoom call or meeting with you and staff at your school, and may see/hear that you are using a different name or pronoun,” the note reads. “If you are concerned about your caregiver’s response, you may not be ready to complete any of the above processes.”

It’s unclear why the district refers to parents as “caregivers.”

If they gave a care they wouldn’t put their kids in government schools.

Time to leave.

Read it.

In New York City, there is an exhibit honoring the victims of Gaza’s October 7 massacres. A week ago, many Jews attended an event there. Leaving the event on the subway, they were harassed by a “masked mob of pro-Hamas demonstrators,” including one masked man who accosted a group of Jews on the subway and demanded that “Zionists” raise their hands, warning, “This is your chance to get out.” That anti-Jewish “activist” has now been identified as Christopher Husary. And nothing about his history will surprise you.

Read it.

For almost a decade Disney has been on a Diveristy, Equity and Inclusion induced spiral into clown world (along with a number of major entertainment and media companies). The shift by corporations towards promoting ideological propaganda instead of chasing profits started out subtle and has quickly escalated into a crescendo of absurdity.

Disney has become the public focus of the wokification of media for a number of reasons including the conglomerate’s massive size and global reach, but more than anything else, it used to be family favored company. When an organization makes the virtues of family and childhood innocence its brand, any slide into degeneracy or indoctrination is going to be amplified and scrutinized.

Read it.

A new series of papers presented as an objective guide to populist parties adds fuel to the panic over the rise of the ‘far right’ in Europe. Still reeling from June’s election results, the academics behind a Europe-wide political blacklist have updated their terms of engagement by claiming to offer clear and workable language for understanding recent trends—while completely wedded to a Brussels-based and centrist view of politics.

Read it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit heard oral arguments June 11 in St. Joseph Parish v. Nessel. The case involves St. Joseph Catholic School in Saint Johns, Michigan, which is asking the court to protect its ability to hire staff who share the same faith.

In July 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court reinterpreted a state civil rights statute’s definition of sex to include sexual orientation, without any exemption for religious organizations. In March 2023, the Michigan Legislature wrote the change into state law, expressly prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

The school’s right to hire staff who hold Catholic religious views on marriage and gender is at risk. St. Joseph’s asks all staff to be practicing Catholics who uphold the faith.

St. Joseph’s also risks being sued for discrimination because of its beliefs about gender and marriage, because the law makes it illegal to decline to use staff members’ or students’ preferred personal pronouns or to have separate girls’ and boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

Time to leave.

New York Times.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked Iowa from enforcing its own immigration law, which makes it a state crime to enter Iowa after being deported or denied entry into the United States.

The ruling comes amid a national push by statehouse conservatives to assert authority over illegal immigration, which the Justice Department argues is solely the federal government’s responsibility.

“As a matter of politics, the new legislation might be defensible,” Judge Stephen Locher wrote. “As a matter of constitutional law, it is not.”

The doctrine involved is ‘pre-emption‘. This is why, when activists try to get control over people’s lives, they prefer to do it at the Federal level.

Read it.

“America is the land of opportunity.” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” “America is a melting pot.” Those are examples of harmful “microaggressions,” according to Columbia professor Derald Wing Sue, lauded by Oregon’s state government as a “microaggressions expert.”

Now, under a soon-to-be-finalized ethics rule from the Oregon Medical Board, doctors who commit “microaggressions” risk losing their medical licenses.

Under Oregon law, doctors who fail to report “unprofessional conduct” from themselves or a colleague within 10 business days can face severe penalties, including loss of license. The state’s medical board is in the process of shoehorning “microaggressions”—innocently intentioned behaviors interpreted by women or minorities to be subliminal communications of bias—into its definition of “unprofessional conduct,” according to the proposed rule, which the board unveiled in April.

Read it.

The Biden Administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just issued a proposal to ban medical debt from factoring into your credit score. But for free-money socialists and their Keynesian bedfellows, this doesn’t go nearly far enough: short of canceling medical debt entirely, nothing else is acceptable.

Read it.

The European Union is ready to punish France if Marine Le Pen’s nationalist-sovereigntist National Rally (Rassemblement National) wins the upcoming French parliamentary elections, writes establishment media outlet Politico. According to the article, the European Commission may not let a right-wing government “off the hook” with regards to France’s overspending, unlike their leniency with the current and previous cabinets. This is clearly a sign that the EU institutions use their ‘power of the purse’ to penalise only those member states they politically disagree with.

New York Post.

A patriotic middle schooler who was “humiliated” by his principal when he was barred from giving his school election speech has been kicked out of the school, the student’s mother claims.

Hattie Ruggles shared the news Tuesday that her son Jimmy Heyward and his two sisters would not be returning to Saint Bonaventure Catholic School in Huntington Beach, Calif., over a violation of the school’s code of conduct.

“Finally heard from St. Bonaventure. This morning we received an email terminating Jimmy, Alice, and Livia from the school and will not allow them to return next year,” Ruggles shared on Facebook along with a photo of the termination letter, referencing her three children.

Catholic schools aren’t what they used to be.

New York Post.

Summertime in presidential campaign season tends to resemble midyear network TV schedules of yesteryear: unpopular, full of re-runs and marred by the occasional high-concept experiment gone horribly wrong.

Such is the Democrats’ latest attempt to jump-start their stubbornly nonplussed electorate with a jolt of old-timey hate.

Presented with endless potential lines of attack against the GOP’s court-convicted-nominee and his bottomless well of sycophants, lefties are instead sounding the ooga-booga alarm against a menace that does not meaningfully exist: Christian nationalism.

“Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration,” warned a Politico headline, over an article about . . . a single such ally, who heads up a three-year-old think tank no one’s ever heard of, and speaks with the former president “at least once a month” (according to an anonymous source, natch).

The Foundry.

Democratic lawmakers are escalating their attacks on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the wake of secret recordings that were obtained last week of the justice agreeing that America should return “to a place of godliness.”

Sounds good to me.

Read it.

A coalition of immigrant advocacy groups sued the Biden administration on Wednesday over President Joe Biden’s recent directive that effectively halts asylum claims at the southern border, saying it differs little from a similar move during the Trump administration that was blocked by the courts.

Read it.

Rap artist Jay-Z drew outrage from left-wing critics over the weekend when his talent agency unveiled an initiative to promote a school-choice program that would give Philadelphia’s low-income students access to the city’s prestigious private schools.

Roc Nation, the talent agency Jay-Z founded, will host events to educate residents about proposed legislation in the Pennsylvania Senate that would distribute from public funds up to $300 million in scholarships to low-income students. The legislation is similar to school-choice voucher programs across the country that give students the opportunity to pursue education at private schools rather than low-performing public schools.

“We want to empower the youth and families with the knowledge to pursue their scholastic dreams, make their voices heard, and become the leaders of tomorrow,” Roc Nation’s managing director of philanthropy Dania Diaz said of the initiative. Left-wing opponents of school-choice policies, however, described Jay-Z’s education initiative as a betrayal and a sinister collaboration with right-wing forces.

“This is no different than the right-wing efforts in Arizona, Florida and elsewhere just because they put a Black face on it,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project series.

“All within the stete, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

“The Virginia NAACP is bringing this lawsuit on behalf of its members and families, including students in the Shenandoah County school system,” the NAACP’s press release announcing the lawsuit reads. “The families whose children attend Shenandoah County Public Schools seek the removal of Confederate names and mascots and to prevent any future naming involving Confederate leaders. The Virginia NAACP will not allow localities to advance white supremacy. The Virginia NAACP will continue to fight against policies and legislation that serve to send the Commonwealth of Virginia backward.”

The lawsuit comes after the school board voted to reverse a 2020 decision to change the schools’ names because they were linked to Confederate leaders. On May 10, the Shenandoah board voted 5-1 to reinstate the original names, with Mountain View High School going back to the name Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary School returning to the name Ashby-Lee Elementary School.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The conservationist group known as NYC Audubon changed its name to NYC Bird Alliance to distance itself from the pro-slavery views of ornithologist and illustrator John James Audubon, the organization announced.

Rod Dreher.

On Monday, Americans and Britons woke up to media reports about the surge of the “far right” in Europe. The news, according to Anglophone media, was especially bad in France, where the “far right” walloped President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition so thoroughly that Macron felt compelled to call snap elections.

English speakers could be forgiven for panicking over fear that a Franco-fascist skunk called Pepe Le Pétain had come to stink up the Republic, and herald the odiferous return of Vichy. After all, what else could “far right” mean?

After this weekend’s vote, it should be clear that “far right” is a term that says more about the biases of the person using it than it does about the person or party to whom it is applied.

Read it.

If you don’t get on board with woke, you oppose “democracy.” You’re a bigot, a racist, or a Christian nationalist.

Where does this insane idea come from? It comes from the spin masters at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a map with Ku Klux Klan chapters. It updates this “hate map” annually with a “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for the previous year. On Tuesday, it published the report for 2023.

Read it.

For years, free speech advocates (including myself) have criticized the new rationalization for censorship in the cause of combating disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. As discussed in my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, there is a burgeoning cottage industry in academia in helping corporations and government agencies to target certain political, social, and scientific viewpoints. One of those centers is located at the Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Now, however, the faculty are accusing each other of misinformation over the departure of “misinformation and disinformation” expert Joan Donovan.

Read it.

The world’s largest math education organization is injecting identity politics where it doesn’t belong—and undermining math education in the process.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics told teachers to “regularly and intentionally integrate more equity, justice, and culturally centered mathematics education” in every math lesson in a May 20 position statement,

The council argues that math education must respond to the “culture” of students, represented in “multidimensional identities,” including “race, ethnicity, religion, generation, gender, sexual orientation, education, class, occupation and socio-economic status, and disability.”

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has put a group founded by a lesbian on its “hate map” because the group opposes the transgendering, mutilation and sexualizing of children.

UnHerd.

On 25 November 1970, the great Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima arrived for an appointment with the commandant of the Tokyo barracks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, Eastern Command. With the help of four others who joined him on his visit, Mishima tied the commandant to a chair and then strode out onto his balcony to pour vitriol on post-war Japan. A crowd of bewildered recruits below heard Mishima effectively call for a coup d’état, accusing his countrymen of chasing economic prosperity while “forgetting the principles of the nation, losing their native spirit, pursuing the trivial without correcting the essential [and] leading themselves into spiritual emptiness”.

The reaction among most Japanese to Mishima’s speech and subsequent ritual suicide — he plunged a samurai sword into his belly back in the commandant’s office, before one of his comrades beheaded him — was one of mystification and sadness. Others, both in Japan and around the world, found that Mishima’s message resonated.

Among them was the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, by this point in his early-70s. Disappointed by the demise, 25 years earlier, of what he regarded as the “miracle” of Japan’s fascist theocracy, Evola saw in Mishima’s final act a courageous call for his country to awaken from the prosperous slumber into which it had been cast by the United States, first as post-war occupier and then as partner in an uneven alliance.

To some people, there is no ‘right’ but the ‘far-right’. Many of these people work in ‘journalism’.

Read it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual list of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” Tuesday, and many conservatives say they are disappointed to be left out.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has squandered its credibility on hate. It gained its reputation by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, but it took the program it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it to smear conservative and Christian groups as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with Klan chapters.

The SPLC is currently facing a defamation lawsuit that has made it to the discovery process. A former employee called this a “highly profitable scam,” and some conservatives consider landing on the SPLC’s “hate map” to be a badge of honor.

Read it.

The names and photos of the students in a New Jersey high school Jewish club were cut from the 2024 edition of the East Brunswick High School yearbook in what the town’s mayor has called a “blatant antisemitic act.”

Read it.

It’s not enough to be gay, you have to be the correct (not right, God forbid) kind of gay.

Read it.

Fewer fuel particles injected into the atmosphere reduce cloud droplet density and this leads to clouds that reflect less solar radiation back into space.

Read it.

Google continues to bury former President Donald Trump’s campaign website after a Manhattan, New York jury came down with a guilty verdict in the dubious case filed by George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg.

MRC Free Speech America analyzed Google search results for the eight presidential candidates still in the race Friday. Despite his donation website crashing due to the overwhelming number of visitors following the verdict Thursday, former President Trump was the only candidate whose campaign website did not appear on the first page of search results a day later. All seven other candidates’ websites, including those of President Joe Biden and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr, appeared in the first 10 results when researchers searched for each candidate’s name and the phrase “presidential race 2024.”

“There you go again,” said MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris. “Google is up to its old censorship antics in an all-important election season. Just like it did in 2022, burying Republican campaign websites in key Senate races, burying its biggest critics and burying the GOP candidate in the Georgia runoff races, Google is burying the leading GOP challenger in the 2024 presidential race from the first page of results.”