The American Mind.

A striking feature of a debased democratic order is the alacrity by which long esteemed political figures, authors, works of art, and cultural practices can suddenly be subjected to vicious “cancellation” efforts. Fortunately, these attempts do not always succeed, at least completely and irrevocably. But they do serious damage to our capacity to admire excellence (and tried and true wisdom) and to sustain the vigorous debate and disputation that is essential to free political and intellectual life.

The examples are at once numerous and revealing. Icons of American egalitarian democracy such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are treated as non-persons in elite circles today, caricatured beyond recognition. The new racialists confuse Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, with a run-of-the-mill racist, a potential candidate for membership in the Ku Klux Klan. The play Hamilton, which premiered in early 2015, went from being celebrated as the greatest musical of its generation, a moving tribute to multiracial democracy and the promise of the American Founding, to being denounced as racist almost overnight. It was even half-cancelled by the author of its book, music, and lyrics, Lin-Manuel Miranda himself, in a display of cowardice that taints his original achievement.

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Defense attorney Randy Zelin and former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore said on Friday that Judge Juan Merchan violated the U.S. Constitution with his instructions to the jury in former President Donald Trump’s trial.

Merchan instructed the jury that it is not a requirement for them to be in unanimous agreement about what “other crime” Trump committed, instead receiving a choice of three separate crimes they can select to convict the former president.

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A Minneapolis police officer responding to a shooting call was ambushed and killed Thursday when he stopped to provide aid to a man who appeared to be a victim. That man instead wound up shooting the officer, authorities said.

The death of officer Jamal Mitchell happened during a chaotic situation involving two crime scenes two blocks apart that left three people dead, two others hospitalized in critical condition and another officer and a firefighter with less serious injuries.

“I’ve seen the video, and he was ambushed,” Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said at an evening news conference. “I’m using the term for a reason.”

Funny how these ‘ambush-style shootings’ always seem to happen in Blue States.

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A bill that would allow students who are illegal immigrants to work at California colleges and universities passed the state Assembly on May 22.

Currently, students must obtain a work permit to hold jobs on campus. That would change under Assembly Bill 2586, introduced by Assemblyman David Alvarez of San Diego.

And no doubt they will get preference over U.S. citizens and legal immigrants because they’re from a Fashionable Victim Group.

Time to leave.

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A group founded by former Trump administration officials accused Tyson Foods on Wednesday of discriminating against U.S. citizens by disproportionately hiring immigrants, including children and people in the country illegally.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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Perhaps it’s the fact that Big Towns are run by Democrats and are swiftly becoming hellholes of crime and corruption. That’s just a guess.

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Maybe we can ship them our BLM and AntiFa rioters.

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Prior to the pandemic, evictions took 6-7 weeks if a tenant needed the boot. Now, an “unlawful detainer” eviction case in Seattle or surrounding areas won’t be heard until 2025.

“There’s a pretty enormous backlog,” said Edmund Witter from the King County Bar’s Pro Bono Services, Fox13 reports. “If you’re a landlord trying to evict someone, it could take months to get a hearing date. That’s the big issue.”

According to King County Councilman Regan Dunn, the last year has been particularly bad – with an estimated 2,200 to 6,500 unresolved cases, and roughly 600 new eviction requests each month.

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California now leads the nation in imposing dumb wage laws. The state just raised the hourly minimum wage for fast food workers to $20.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “We saw the inequities … we had a responsibility to do more.”

Unions pushed for the higher minimum, and in Democrat-run states, unions usually get what they want.

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You’re about to meet a group of New York University graduates with fresh degrees, likely burdened with a few hundred thousand dollars in debt unless their elite liberal parents footed the bill. Many companies are increasingly viewing woke degrees as liabilities rather than assets.

If these graduates are lucky—and don’t end up as Starbucks baristas—they will have a bright and colorful future at some woke mega-corporation. There, they will be placed in non-productive managerial roles to advance destructive ESG and DEI movements.

It all starts at NYU classrooms indoctrination camps, where the kids are being uploaded the woke mind virus by activist professors. These kids are being brainwashed into not improving society but, in fact, being managers to spread wokesim to dismantle Western society.

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Ireland was embarrassed recently when the country, via referendum, rejected an amendment to its Constitution that would have revoked a special consideration supporting motherhood. The government was so red-faced by that loss that the prime minister stepped down.

Yet it’s hard to think of a more embarrassing law than one that would lead to arresting people for silently praying on public streets. Such a law rightfully conjures up notions of “thoughtcrime” and dystopias such as in the movie “Minority Report.” Such a law should rightfully be ridiculed.

But that is just what many in the United Kingdom seem to want. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a longtime pro-life leader with March for Life UK, was arrested in December 2022 for silently praying within an abortion clinic “buffer zone.” A widely shared video shows a Birmingham police officer asking Vaughan-Spruce, “Are you praying?” as she stands quietly within the buffer zone, to which she replies: “I might be praying in my head.” Immediately after, the officer informs her that she is under arrest.

The American Mind.

Race, more than anything else, has come to define American politics. Sixty years after the Civil Rights Act, it permeates virtually all political and cultural discourse. The decades-long campaign to position race at the center of American life has succeeded, and to avoid the subject is to embrace irrelevance.

Most accounts of this transformation are celebratory, as scholars and cultural tastemakers are intimately aware of the advantages of affirming the present. But in recent years a small cohort of intellectual rebels have gone against the grain, most notably Christopher Caldwell, whose book The Age of Entitlement provides an alternate account of the 1960s.

Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act effectively replaced the U.S. Constitution as the nation’s primary legal and moral authority, abridging the social contract and fundamentally altering the relationship between Americans and their government. Since its publication, Age of Entitlement has served as the definitive counterargument to the whitewashed, self-congratulatory retelling of racial progress. Caldwell’s book is a must-read, and its powerful thesis will continue to influence political dissent for years to come.

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The felony arrest of an illegal immigrant in Chicago on May 15 has marked his 10th police apprehension in the past 10 months.

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Amazon has forbid employees from hanging signs showing the number of days one of their co-workers has been held hostage by Hamas, according to a Hebrew-language newspaper.

Time to leave.

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Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.

Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.

Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.

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Specifically, almost one in three (29.2%) in ‘junk’ Class 5 had ‘uncertainties’ up to 5°C as defined by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Nearly half (48.7%) were sited at ‘near junk’ Class 4 sites with ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C. Shockingly, only 52 stations, or just 13.7% of the total, came without any ‘uncertainty’ rating. Class 5 station are prone to pick up all manner of human and natural caused heat corruptions, while class 1 sites simply measure the surrounding air temperature.

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Wactor was killed early Saturday morning after he allegedly caught three suspects trying to steal a catalytic converter from his car.

Time to leave.

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School systems complain about the rising costs of handling illegal immigrants. Here’s a spotlight on two cities, one in Massachusetts, the other Colorado.

Both blue ‘sanctuary’ states. Cry me a river….

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It’s yet another reminder of why blindly ‘trusting the science’ may not always be the best go-to move in the future.

217 year old Wiley science publisher has reportedly “peer reviewed” more than 11,000 papers that were determined to be fake without ever noticing. The papers were referred to as “naked gobbledygook sandwiches”, Australian blogger Jo Nova wrote on her blog last week.

“It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry,” she said. “Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?”

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Mass migration is overwhelming American public schools and costing legal Americans public education services, school administrators are warning.

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Cannabis is a commonly used substance in the United States, with 49 percent of people trying it at least once, Hou and a team of US researchers report in their published paper. Some US states and other countries have made it legal, but we still don’t fully understand its effects on our health.

The researchers studied around 1,000 adults who had participated in a long-term previous study where they had been asked about their cannabis use over a 20-year period. Study participants provided blood samples on two occasions during that time, at the 15- and 20-year points. They were aged between 18 and 30 at baseline, or ‘year 0’.

Using these blood samples from five years apart, Hou and her team looked at the epigenetic changes, specifically DNA methylation levels, of people who had used cannabis recently or for a long time.

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Nineteen Republican state attorneys general hit five Democrat-controlled states with a legal challenge alleging that the blue states are illegally attempting to impose aggressive climate policies on the rest of the country.

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In a recent hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski warned of an escalating trend of censorship in countries once considered bastions of free speech. He cited examples such as France, where the government has cracked down on so-called “hate speech,” and Germany, where social media companies face hefty fines for failing to remove “illegal content” within 24 hours. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have also introduced controversial laws that could stifle free expression.

But perhaps the most egregious example of this troubling trend is Brazil. According to Elon Musk, no country where X (formerly Twitter) operates experiences a worse state of censorship than Brazil, a nation until recently regarded as the largest liberal democracy in the Southern Hemisphere. Since 2019, the powerful Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, now infamous, has been conducting his investigation dubbed the “Fake News Probe.” This probe has targeted hundreds of individuals, most recently including Elon Musk himself, for allegedly spreading “disinformation.”

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So far, eight states have officially adopted the ACCII rules for light-duty vehicles: Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Virginia, plus Washington D.C. Three additional states—Connecticut, Maine, and New Mexico—are also considering adoption of the ACCII standards.

All blue states.

Time to leave.

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A professional move by one of the European Commission’s top antitrust officials to a New York-based legal firm has precipitated a formal investigation by the EU Ombudsman over potential conflicts of interest.

The European Commission was publicly warned by Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly about a “negative impact on public trust” as well as a potential spike in “Eurosceptic sentiment” after the EU’s antitrust director Henrik Morch opted for a job with the American multinational law firm Paul Weiss after a 33-year career working in EU institutions.

Specialising in mergers and acquisitions, as well as navigating regulatory frameworks for major corporations, legal giant Paul Weiss gloated about Morch’s defection to the company on their webpage, saying that the former Danish Eurocrat would take a role in their Brussels antitrust office.

“This country is planted thick with laws, man’s laws not God’s.”

God’s laws are very simple:

(1) Be nice. (If you have to ask, it’s probably not nice.)

(2) Don’t do stupid shit. (If you have to ask, it’s probably stupid.)

All the rest is commentary (by people who ought instead to be doing something useful).

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Millions of immigrants keep pouring in. New residential construction has stalled and multi-family construction is in decline. Completions are rising, but is that enough housing?

The American Mind.

The current condition in the United States has been described as a state of “anarcho-tyranny.” This term, originally coined by paleo-conservative writer Sam Francis, was recently defined by Tucker Carlson as “selective punishment while ignoring the rule of law.”

This condition was exemplified by a recent incident in Oakland, California that was so egregious that it would have been unimaginable until recently. Victor Silva is 102 years old and in a wheelchair. He was notified by the city that he is expected to paint over graffiti on a wall that he owns. Failure to do so would result in an $1,100 fine with an additional charge of $1,277 for each time he failed a reinspection. According to news reports he has been doing this for years.

As if all of this was not bad enough, his family owns a nearby commercial building that has been burglarized three times in the past year. He called 911 after each incident, but this never resulted in any investigation, let alone with anyone actually being arrested and charged. While there has not been any mention of just what the City of Oakland has done to punish the vandals and prevent further occurrences, the news media has shown pictures of him painting the fence while seated in his wheelchair. The Sisyphean image of a centenarian in a wheelchair repeatedly being forced to paint over the scribblings of society’s unpunished miscreants is the perfect illustration of just how bad things have become.

ZMan is very dyspeptic today.

A mostly unexamined aspect of the ongoing crisis is the role the media plays in keeping the managerial class misinformed. It is always assumed that the firehose of lies that come from regime media is designed to trick the public, but the truth is no one in charge cares about public opinion outside the extremes. Politicians come and go, and the parties take turns pretending to be in charge but the administrative state and the managerial class that runs it are permanent.

One only has to look at the presidential elections over the last thirty years to see that elections have no impact on policy. Bill Clinton was supposed to be a break with the polices of Reagan and Bush, but things changed very little. Bush was supposed to bring decency back to the White House. Instead, he empowered the neocons, who set about making war on the world. Obama was supposed to put an end to all that war making, but instead doubled down in Afghanistan.

If you could map changes in public policy from election to election since the Cold War you would end up with a line that slowly moves upward. The only change we see is slightly more of the same with each change in administration. The same can be said of the changes in the House and Senate. As we have recently seen with the Republicans in the House, they are just a shadow of the Democrats, who shadow the Republicans as they take turns in the majority.

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The value of a college education is spiraling lower as youngsters realize it’s a giant scam. Racking up $100k in college debt for worthless gender degrees in liberal indoctrination camps, only to graduate and land a job that didn’t require a degree—such as a realtor or bartender, as many millennials found out, has been a major wake-up call.

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As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

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A new study has revealed that roughly 10% to 27% of noncitizens living in the U.S. are illicitly registered to vote, which could result in up to 2.7 million illegal votes being cast in the November elections.

Experts say the significant amount of potential illegal votes could be enough to alter election results.

It ought to come as no surprise that the ‘science’ of psychology is by and for women.

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After years of diligently working to make a college degree represent no more than a high school diploma, college administrators, by promoting “Explorations” type courses, are now working to make a college degree as meaningful as graduating from the 8th grade. This is why books like Academically Adrift can easily show that about half of college graduates have no measurable increase in cognitive skills over what they had in high school; 6 years of college, and all the student gets is a worthless piece of paper and a mountain of debt.

LifeHacker.

Area went for Biden by 10 points.

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Oh, ya think?

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How can they tell it from ordinary modern teen psychosis?

Hot Air.

OK, it’s time to put on your tin foil hats because every damn conspiracy theory is proving to be true.

Sure, I still believe men landed on the moon and that the Earth is round, but I am beginning to doubt almost everything else.

Welcome to our world….

The American Mind.

You have surely heard that your search results on Google (with 92 percent share of the search market) reflect not your curiosities and needs but someone or something else’s views on what you need to know. That’s hardly a secret.

And on Facebook, you are likely inundated by links to official sources to correct any errors you might carry in your head, as well as links to corrections to posts as made by any number of fact-checking organizations.

You have likely also heard of YouTube videos being taken down, apps deleted from stores, and accounts being canceled across a variety of platforms.

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The shootdown of Korean Air Lines flight 007 took the lives of 269 people and raised troubling questions on both sides of the Pacific. How could a trained flight crew make such a colossal navigational error, and then fail to notice for five and a half hours? Were they really so unaware? And how could Soviet air defense fail to recognize that the airliner wasn’t a threat? Did they know that they were attacking a plane full of civilians? For ten years, these questions had no concrete answers, becoming fuel for wild speculation and deliberate manipulation by politicians and amateur observers alike, building a cloud of myth and mystery around the events of that September night. But with the end of the Cold War came an end to the embargo on information, and since 1993 a great deal has come to light about what really happened — not only on board flight 007, but also among the Soviet military personnel who shot it down, and within the halls of power in Moscow and Washington, where staunch cold warriors used the shootdown to further their goals at the expense of the truth. Piecing together the evidence reveals that that truth is at once extraordinary and mundane; unbelievable yet inevitable; monstrous, but also terrifyingly human — a story that still lingers darkly in the imagination more than 40 years after it began.

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Normally, coups in Africa are nothing to write about. But starting in 2020, we saw six countries flip into a pro-Russian direction in just three years. Individually, they were a curiosity. Taken together, that rate of turnover outpaced even the most optimistic neoconservative ambitions for pro–United States regime changes in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark summarized, “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

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The primary appeal of fast-food burgers (even though the food is horrible for your health) is cheap and fast. In recent weeks, McDonald’s indirectly admitted that three years of ‘McFlation’ was crushing burger demand among working-poor consumers, and there was an urgent need within the burger chain to reintroduce the $5 meal deal.

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A West Virginia teen trans athlete defeated nearly 300 girls more than 700 times in middle school track events, according to a court document that’s part of a lawsuit that seeks to prevent the Biden administration’s new Title IX rules from going into effect.

The American Mind.

A few years ago, law professor Gail Heriot pointed out a problem that some on the Right have been noticing for quite some time: “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.” She argued that at its core, disparate impact liability is an “incoherent” legal doctrine, because “all job qualifications have a disparate impact” on at least one protected class. Established in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), disparate impact liability grants “astonishing discretion” to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enforce laws against workplace discrimination.

Disparate impact liability is a feature, not a bug, of our present regime. The supposed ubiquity of guilt allows the state total license to pick and choose its criminals. If everyone is guilty, then anyone may be singled out for punishment at any time.

What disparate impact liability is to the field of employment law, left-academia’s indictment of settler colonialism is to the study of history. Just as the EEOC indiscriminately targets employers whose hiring happens to disfavor non-whites, the academy is likewise free to accuse nations of injustice that have displaced—you guessed it—non-whites.

Yale Insights.

As far as most social media users know, the most powerful tool through which platforms steer public opinion is through the outright removal of objectionable content or users. But Zaman argues that there’s a more potent means through which social media platforms can control collective opinions over time, called “shadow banning.” Part of this tool’s power derives from the fact that it’s currently near-impossible to uncover, even by policymakers or software engineering experts.

The Register.

Chipmaking equipment supplier ASML reportedly has the means to remotely disable its advanced machinery in the hands of TSMC, should China invade Taiwan.

Tensions are high between mainland China and Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a rogue province that it has threatened to reclaim by force.

This is a major concern as a large proportion of the world’s advanced chip manufacturing capacity is found there, and the US in particular is keen to prevent China from having the ability to produce advanced chips for military purposes.

Netherlands-based ASML is said to have reassured the Dutch government that it can remotely disable its most advanced chipmaking machines should such an invasion happen, at least according to Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources claimed to be familiar with the matter.

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Federal prosecutors on Friday announced charges against five people in connection with a Chicago-based scheme that staged armed robberies so the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for legitimate crime victims.

CWBChicago had been working behind the scenes on the story, but withheld publication until charges were announced at the request of our sources. Now, we can tell you the incredible details.

Officials believe hundreds of people, including some who traveled from out of town, posed as customers in dozens of businesses across Chicago and elsewhere, all hoping to win favorable immigration status by becoming “victims” of pre-arranged “armed robberies.”

During a staged hold-up in Bucktown last year, one of the “robbers” accidentally fired their gun, severely injuring a liquor store clerk, according to one source. During that caper alone, five “customers” were “robbed.”