The Spectator.

After consecutive Supreme Court terms with major rulings on abortion, guns and affirmative action, the justices don’t have anything on the docket now that will roil the culture wars. (The Trump ballot case to be argued as this goes to press will be a small blip.) Instead, this year our black-robed philosopher-kings are doing battle with the administrative state — which Steve Bannon promised to “deconstruct” when Donald Trump took office last go-round.

Read it.

If you’re one of the many people worried that US foreign policy is in the hands of a visibly declining eighty-one year-old president, Alexander Ward’s account of the Biden administration’s first two years in office may — or may not — make you feel better, for he leaves readers with little doubt as to who is actually the executive branch’s most influential decision-maker: forty-seven year-old national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Ward might deny any such authorial intent, but time and again he shows his hand, as when he invokes “Sullivan’s first two years at the helm alongside Biden.” Secretary of state Antony Blinken is of course close on Sullivan’s heels, but Ward’s thoroughly reported book, along with Chris Whipple’s similar tome from early 2023, The Fight of His Life, both remind anyone tempted to forget that the calamitous August 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan remains the defining event of Joe Biden’s first term in the White House.

Chilton Williamson.

It is a tragic but incontrovertible fact that the vast majority of people in recent decades, are neither living in what they call “real time” (as if time could be anything else) nor experiencing life and the world itself at first hand, but rather at second or third remove; like sitting behind the wheel of a fifth- or sixth- hand automobile with no tires and a seized-up engine purchased from a used-car salesman straight out of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, pumping the accelerator and shouting “Vroom, vroooooom!” To drive home the aptness of this simile, I cite the fact, ascertained some years ago by the sort of pedagogue who devotes his career to such investigations, that young Americans today, many fewer of whom own cars or have even learned to drive them than in the relatively recent past, choose to remain at home with their noses pressed to their computer screens in preference to buying a jalopy and hitting the open road as previous generations of American youth did (though it is difficult to imagine a travel video made by Jack Kerouac being a satisfying substitute for his book).

Read it.

While Special Counsel Robert K. Hur has raised the issue of mental deterioration in explaining why he declined to prosecute 81-year-old Joe Biden for illegal retention and sharing of classified documents, the president chose another rationale to declare himself not culpable: He shifted the blame to the staffers who boxed up his records as he left the vice president’s office in 2017.

Read it.

A wave of intense pro-Palestinian activism within the broad literary community has included bestselling Jewish authors being targeted online as “Zionists,” despite not making comments about Israel; protests against pro-Israel writers; and demonstrations at events, such as a major writers conference in Kansas City this week, that have left some Jews feeling intimidated and unwelcome.

The Jewish Book Council’s new initiative, announced Wednesday, asks people to share evidence of alleged antisemitism and promises to maintain anonymity for those who submit.

“We encour­age reports of both small­er-scale inci­dents (such as an indi­vid­ual get­ting review-bombed because their book includes Jew­ish con­tent) and larg­er inci­dents (such as Jew­ish lit­er­ary pro­fes­sion­als fac­ing threats of intim­i­da­tion and violence),” the group said in its announcement. It added, “The hope is that, by report­ing and record­ing anti­semitism in the lit­er­ary world, we can help to put sup­port sys­tems in place for those affected.”

Read it.

Denver is buckling under a financial crisis caused by illegal immigration. But the fault lies not in the stars, but with the city itself.

“Denver will cut hours at recreation centers, end in-person vehicle-registration renewals and eliminate spring flower beds to save $5 million this year, a response to the migrant crisis that is expected to cost the city $180 million,” the Colorado Sun reported.

But the city isn’t just cutting corners on niche city services.

Get Woke, go broke.

Read it.

Another day, another city, another collapse in the commercial real estate market.

This week the property in question is a 20 story building located at 1515 Market St. in Philadelphia, which Philadelphia Business Journal notes has “joined a growing list” of distressed office properties in the city.

Almost $60 million in debt backed by the building was moved to special servicing in December, the report says. Owner Accesso Partners, based in Florida, has a $59.4 million balance on the building, which it acquired in 2014 for $85 million.

Power Line.

“We do have three persons detained and under investigation for today’s incident,” Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves told reporters Wednesday. According to Graves, “bad actors” had caused the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ rally, and unidentified “officials” said they did not believe the motive was terrorism. (Word starting to dribble out today that the shooting may have been “a personal matter,” which is a euphemism for “gang-related.”)

Fox News identified no suspects or possible motive, and provided no information on the firearms used in the attack.

According to Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, the high number of wounded and low number of dead suggests that the perps were non-white. The fact that no news outlet has mentioned the perps’ race or provided pictures reinforces this suspicion.

Read it.

San Francisco eliminated eighth-grade algebra for all students in 2014, enraging parents and students alike—particularly because students who don’t take the course in middle school cannot easily advance to calculus, a requirement of most elite universities for applicants to math and science programs. The district’s reversal comes as a growing number of districts around the country nix honors classes in the name of “equity.” Over the past few years, districts in Michigan, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Jersey, and elsewhere abolished honors courses in subjects such as English, math, and chemistry to promote more equitable outcomes.

Time to leave.

Read it.

“Can Selecting the Most Qualified Candidate Be Unfair?” asked researchers in a recent study published by the American Psychological Association.

Read it.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Kill those jobs! Kill those jobs!

Read it.

After a group of migrants gang-raped a 13-year-old girl in Italy, CNN responded by expressing concern about how it might help the “far-right.”

The girl was raped in front of her boyfriend in a public park in the Sicilian city of Catania.

The seven suspects are all Egyptian migrants and three were under the age of 18.

Read it.

Officially, the Palestinian Authority works with Israel to crack down on terror groups in the West Bank. But off-duty PA security forces have carried out dozens of attacks on Israelis, according to a watchdog group.

An investigation by Palestinian Media Watch, the nonprofit watchdog based in Jerusalem, documented at least 55 attacks by PA security forces against Israeli soldiers or civilians since 2020, including four in the past month alone. In each case, the PA or its ruling Fatah party has eulogized the attacker as one of their own “soldiers.”

The findings reveal the extent to which the PA, the internationally recognized Palestinian government in Ramallah, encourages and rewards terrorism against Israel—even in its own ranks. For Israel, such activity proves the folly of the Biden administration’s demand that a “revitalized” PA be allowed to govern Gaza following Israel’s war against Hamas, the rival Palestinian faction that rules the territory.

Another reminder that Islam is an oppressive (and genocidal) ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

… that whenever you see a photo of a ‘celebrity couple’, the guy is looking at the girl but the girl is looking at the camera? It’s as if the guy is just another prop.

Read it.

Rachel Dolezal was president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP when she posed for this 2015 photo. Dolezal resigned June 15, 2015, amid a furor over racial identity that erupted when her parents came forward to say she has been posing as Black for years when she is actually white. She has changed her name to Nkechi Diallo and now lives in Tucson, where she was working as a part-time instructor for Catalina Foothills Unified School District. District officials said she is no longer employed there after they learned Tuesday of her OnlyFans social media content.

Read it.

group that wants to defund police departments and a federal immigration agency.

The Indivisible Project, which calls itself one of the nation’s largest progressive grassroots groups, endorsed Gallego on Wednesday, its second endorsement in a 2024 Senate race. Gallego said Indivisible “plays a crucial role” in mobilizing voters “around the issues that matter most.” He praised their work on the issue of abortion access and “defending our democracy,” and said he was “honored” to have their support.

Gallego touts the endorsement as crime and immigration are shaping up to be trouble spots for Democrats in swing states across the country. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 51 percent of Arizona voters trust Donald Trump on immigration, compared with just 31 percent who say the same about President Joe Biden. Respondents said immigration was their second biggest concern, thanks in large part to a historic surge of illegal aliens at the border.

Power Line.

Anyone who follows California politics will know that California adopted a “jungle” primary system some time ago, in which all candidates for an office in the spring primary run on a single ballot line, with the top two finishers advancing to the November general election. The Republican Party has fallen so low in California in recent years that several U.S. Senate races have come down to two Democrats in November. Kamala Harris squared off against fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez in 2016, while Dianne Feinstein faced Los Angeles Democrat Kevin de Leon in 2018.

This year three Democratic House members of note are vying to replace the late Feinstein: the egregious Adam Schiff, the showboat Katie Porter, and the race-mongering Barbara Lee. Early polls last fall showed Porter in the lead ahead of Schiff, with Lee a distant third. The only Republican in the race with any name ID is former Los Angeles Dodgers star Steve Garvey.

Lately the TV airwaves have been blanketed with ads from Schiff attacking Steve Garvey in a manner that looks like a general election campaign. The ads attack Garvey for having voted for Trump twice and for being “too conservative for California.” Unlike most TV ads that use unflattering black and white photos, the pictures and video of Garvey are attractive and flattering. It’s almost as though Schiff is trying to boost Garvey (who has very little cash and is running no ads) in the primary and make sure Garvey is his opponent in November, and not a fellow Democrat.

The American Mind.

Never believe what bipartisan foreign policy establishment hacks say about China and Russia. They don’t believe what they say, either. The Blob (as Obama aide Ben Rhodes called it) learned through generations of strategic blunders that if everyone closes ranks and sticks to the same story, its members will survive a strategic disaster of any magnitude with their careers intact. The same principle explains why not a single American banker went to jail after the subprime collapse of 2008, the biggest fraud in all financial history. The Blob’s logic is simple: If you go after one of us, then you have to go after all of us, and who will be left to put things back together?

NBC.

Criticism of Biden from that notorious right-wing misinformation monger NBC News.

Read it.

Iran test fired advanced ballistic missiles on Tuesday in a series of war drills meant to prepare the Islamic Republic for a strike on Israeli military sites that house American-made F-35 fighter jets, according to the country’s state-controlled media.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is behind a series of recent strikes on American and Israeli positions across the Middle East, “simulated destroying hangars housing the Israeli regime’s United States-procured F-35 warplanes by using ballistic missiles,” according to information about the drills published in Tehran’s official media outlets.

During the war simulation, the IRGC fired “enhanced versions of its Emad and Qadr ballistic missiles against the F-35 hangars located inside a mock-up of the Tel Aviv regime’s Palmachim Airbase,” located just outside of the major Israeli city. Iran claims its missiles are capable of striking deep into Israel and are capable of traveling more than 1,000 miles.

Another reminder that Islam is an oppressive totalitarian (and genocidal) ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

Rasmussen.

Democrats overwhelmingly approve of states removing former President Donald Trump’s name from 2024 election ballots.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 47% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of state officials removing Trump’s name from the ballot, including 34% who Strongly Approve. Fifty percent (50%) disapprove, including 42% who Strongly Disapprove of states taking Trump’s name off the ballot. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Please sign up for the Rasmussen Reports daily e-mail update (it’s free) or follow us on Facebook. Let us keep you up to date with the latest public opinion news.
The survey of 880 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on February 8 and 11-12, 2024 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research.

Like ‘AntiFa’, ‘Democrat’ means exactly the opposite.

Read it.

In June of 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade and clarified that there was no constitutional right to abortion.

Within minutes of the court’s ruling, hard-line liberals across the nation were howling about restricted access to abortion and devising new and novel ways to ensure its protection.

The latest creative effort to secure abortion access, mounted by a group of satanists in Idaho, was just defeated in federal court.

Washington Poop.

A poll from The Washington Post finds widespread agreement among Americans on what it means to be middle class. But just over a third of U.S. adults have the financial security to meet that definition, according to a Post analysis of data from the Federal Reserve.

Americans also underestimate the income required for that lifestyle, suggesting that the popular image of middle-class security is more of an aspiration than a reality for most Americans.

About 9 in 10 U.S. adults said that six individual indicators of financial security and stability were necessary parts of being middle class in the Post poll. Smaller majorities thought other milestones, such as homeownership and a job with paid sick leave, were necessary.

Read it.

A migrant charged with assaulting two cops in Times Square last month and subsequently freed without bail was arrested again Tuesday night while allegedly trying to rob a Macy’s store in Queens.

NYPD officials confirmed 19-year-old Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel as one of four individuals accused of “acting in concert” to steal over $600 worth of clothing in the Queens Center Mall at around 5:30 p.m Tuesday. A security guard tried to confront the suspects but was punched in the face by one of them and suffered minor injuries.

While Gomez-Izquiel was arrested after getting away initially, the other three suspects—two men and a woman—remain on the run as of Wednesday morning. “[Gomez-Izquiel] acted as a lookout with a group of three unapprehend[ed] others, who concealed merchandise from inside the store and passed all points of sale without paying,” the NYPD said in a statement.

Read it.

in the district, the latest to shut down amid a surge in violence that has affected residents’ safety.

“D.C. is getting a bad rap right now,” Doron Petersan, who owns the popular vegan spot Sticky Fingers Diner, told Fox 5. “There’s crime, for sure, and it makes it extremely difficult to operate.”

Petersan added that she herself was the victim of a carjacking while making deliveries for her business, which specializes in vegan sweets. She lambasted the district’s government for not doing more to stop crime.

The first obligation of any government is to keep people safe. If it’s not doing that, it’s a failure. We are seeing that Democrats literally cannot be trusted to run a government competently.

The American Mind.

If you had asked me ten years ago about the possibility of a future civil war in America, I—an “Intelligence Community” veteran who analyzes civil conflict in Asia—would have laughed. I’m not laughing anymore, and neither are a lot of other people. Recent tensions between the federal government and Texas over the former’s refusal to secure the border and enforce immigration law are bringing to life scenarios that once seemed theoretical, if not fantastic. In mid-January, “Texas soldiers” took control of a section of the border near Eagle Pass and then denied access to federal agents, setting the stage for a standoff some alarmists are calling “today’s Fort Sumter.” Even as Texas pushes beyond legal and normative boundaries, creating a potential constitutional crisis in the process, more dangerous challenges lie ahead. In today’s America, a combination of democratic backsliding, ethnic factionalism, and elite splintering have set the stage for a series of intractable political and legal challenges that could plausibly lead to violence in 2024. The only real questions now relate to the scale of the violence and whether the American union will ultimately survive it.

Read it.

The United States is bankrolling its own “invasion” by funding the United Nations and its partners, which, in turn, give hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and aid to migrants who eventually cross the U.S. southern border illegally.

While the U.N. has aided migrants for decades, the scope of its operation has dramatically expanded as the number of illegal immigrants—from at least 160 countries—into the United States has surged.

That expansion has been fueled by more than $1 billion in funding from the U.S. government to the U.N. and other agencies assisting migrants, according to a government spending database.

“We’re actually funding our own border crisis,” Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a “pro-immigrant, low-immigration” think tank, told The Epoch Times.

“And it’s provided by, ultimately, the United States taxpayer.”

Read it.

A rabbi at several British universities who drew hundreds of death threats after flying to Israel to serve as a reserve soldier after Oct. 7 is now in hiding with his wife and two children on the recommendation of police.

Both the University of Leeds and British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis have condemned the threats against Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, his wife Nava, and their two children, which began shortly after Oct. 7 and escalated recently with antisemitic phone calls and an attack on the school’s Hillel House.

“Tell that Jewish son of a bitch we are coming for him,” a message left for Nava Deutsch said, according to the Daily Mail, which listened to some of the messages.

ZMan ponders modern life.

Anarcho-tyranny is a feature of managerialism, not a bug, because it is what is necessary for managerialism to survive. The people at the top of the system must remain at the top of the system and the only way to ensure that is to make sure everyone is following their orders. The stated goals of the system are a means to an end and the end is to perpetuate the system. The reason you must follow orders may change, but you must always follow orders.

Eventually this advances to the point where the system becomes so conservative and brittle it is unable to adapt. We cannot know how fascism would have ended, but we saw how communism ended. In its final days it was old men desperately trying to hold onto power by enforcing rules that no longer made sense. Once people stopped following orders, the whole thing collapsed. It is something to think about the next time you are pulled over for speeding on a lonely highway.

Read it.

The Biden administration does not have a plan in place to prevent Hezbollah from cashing in on its proposed menthol cigarette ban, which lawmakers and experts say will open up a black market that will enrich the Iran-backed terror group and Mexican drug cartels.

As the FDA considers a ban on mentholated cigarettes, a type smoked by around 40 percent of adults, lawmakers have been pressing federal authorities to develop contingency plans meant to stop Hezbollah and its Mexican cartel partners from smuggling black market cigarettes into the United States.

But Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) do not appear to have developed any plans to combat the emerging black market menthol trade, which is likely to generate millions in profit. Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist groups have long trafficked in illegal cigarettes, generating revenue that funds terror operations across the globe. The regulated menthol market in the United States is worth an estimated $30 billion.

G. Gordon Liddy, in his autobiography WILL, noted that cartons of Kool cigarettes, the most popular mentholated brand, were the de facto standard currency among black prisoners in the D.C. jail in the early 1970s.

Read it.

One reason both for the popularity of economic liberalism in the United States, and for it being considered a ‘conservative’ value, is that it is psychologically connected to its opposite or counterpart. However implicitly tied to the idea that individual calculation of self-interest in monetary terms will produce collective prosperity and virtue, and however much it is de facto applied (such as to endear the tax code to large corporations rather than proliferating startups, family-owned businesses, and enfranchised communities), we cannot help but notice that the aesthetic of American liberalism is often Chestertonian-distributist.

This is the cornerstone of much conservative thought. We may also think of Donoso Cortés and his emphasis on intermediate classes as bulwarks of Spain’s constitution (her literal constitution as society and body politic). And yet Western culture in general is deeply conditioned by habits of mind that militate against the cultivation and safeguarding of those kinds of property arrangements.

Power Line.

This time, Republicans made sure they had the votes–just barely, as the resolution impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas passed the House by a single vote, 214-213, with three Republicans crossing over to vote against the resolution. Mayorkas thus becomes the first sitting cabinet-level official to be impeached in U.S. history.

Democratic Party press outlets naturally denounced the impeachment as a political stunt, and so on. But for the most part, they have conspicuously failed to inform their readers what Mayorkas was impeached for. In my opinion, the articles of impeachment state a powerful case, itemizing a number of illegal actions on Mayorkas’s part. The resolution is embedded below; you can judge for yourself.

The Spectator.

The idea that Western civilization ushered in an age of oppression, cultural destruction, environmental degradation and all manner of human exploitation, is bittersweet. I don’t mean that it tastes like coffee or dark chocolate. I mean bittersweet the vine, Celastrus orbiculatus, with the colorful orange-red berries. This kind of bittersweet grows at a phenomenal rate, ascending into the canopy and strangling trees. If you drive north out of New York City, you will pass endless miles of arboreal carnage. Tens of thousands of roadside trees are draped in the deadly vine. It is an invasive Asian species that, once established, is impossible to eradicate. And while its fall berries are attractive and make for good floral arrays, they are inedible.

Hatred of Western civilization is the bittersweet of the college curriculum. It is an invasive idea that once ensconced in the classroom strangles every other idea in the minds of many students. It reduces the world into a neat division between the Evil West and the Innocent Rest. In this arrangement, the latter maintain their innocence no matter what they do. Hamas is but the latest beneficiary of this indulgence. Montaigne found nobility in his 1590 essay, “Of Cannibals,” in the Brazilians who cooked their enemies for food. Western intellectuals been busy ever since devising excuses for those who prize primitive appetite over civilized rule.

Read it.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is divisive and counter-productive and can even serve to increase prejudice among participants, a new study by a Canadian professor says.

My, what a surprise.

Read  it.

Major credit card retailers are creating a separate merchant category code (MCC) for firearms and ammunition retailers to comply with a California law that would allow banks to potentially track suspicious gun purchases and report them to law enforcement.

Read it.

In our digital age, laptops and smartphones have become appendages for students and professionals alike. But new research suggests we may want to take a break from all that typing.

A recent study from Norway found that the old-school art of handwriting engages parts of the brain that tapping on a keyboard does not. The intricate movements involved in handwriting activate more regions of the brain associated with learning than typing does.

Read it.

Colorado lawmakers are weighing legislation to require the state’s public and charter schools to socially transition any gender-confused student by adopting that child’s preferred name and pronouns.

The bill states that a student’s “chosen name” is a protected form of “gender expression” that schools must respect. How schools implement and enforce this mandate would be left to local districts and administrators, according to the proposal’s author.

The bill would be the first state law enshrining social transitions at school and has a strong chance of passing given that Colorado Democrats hold a supermajority in the legislature. California, which has led the way on pushing gender ideology in classrooms, has published guidance for districts to let kids change their names and sex markers on unofficial documents. However, it does not have the force of law and two teachers in the state successfully challenged their district’s orders that they adopt their students’ new gender identities without telling their parents.

Read it.

On Wednesday, February 7th, French Justice Minister Éric Dupont-Moretti announced the arrival on French soil of the terrorist Salah Abdeslam, who until then had been imprisoned in Belgium, to serve an “irreducible life imprisonment” (perpétuité incompressible)—a penalty that does not exist in Belgium. The Brussels Court of Appeal ruled that this sentence was inhumane and degrading, and the convicted man’s defence raised this as a question of “rule of law.”

Born in Belgium, Salah Abdeslam is a jihadist of French nationality and Moroccan origin who grew up in the Molenbeek district of Brussels—often described as a breeding ground for terrorists. Affiliated with the Islamic State, he played a decisive role in the attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, which cost the lives of 131 people.

After taking part in the attack on the Bataclan and the shootings targeting the Parisian terraces on the evening of 13 November 2015, he found refuge in Belgium, where he was arrested after several months on the run. He was also involved in the attacks in Brussels in March 2016, and since then has been alternately tried by the French and Belgian judicial authorities.

Last time I looked, there were a sufficiency of Muslim terrorists to go around.

Read it.

On 23 January 2002, American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan. Pearl was an accomplished journalist for The Wall Street Journal, where he had worked since 1990. Starting in 2000, he served as the newspaper’s South Asia Bureau Chief, based in Bombay, India. As part of his journalistic responsibilities, he traveled throughout South Asia and occasionally ventured into Pakistan. On 1 February 2002, he was decapitated for being both American and Jewish.

Read it.

As the level of US debt zooms past the $34 trillion mark, it has become increasingly clear that the American left has no intention of trying to help control government spending. To the extent that annual deficits must be trimmed to protect the integrity of the nation’s currency, Democrats and their allies are instead planning to go beyond the current progressive tax on income and institute a new levy on citizens’ assets.

Some such as Senator Elizabeth Warren openly advocate taking the conventional idea of a property tax and applying it to everything a person owns — cash, savings accounts, stocks, jewelry and even art. Calling for what she has termed her “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” Warren would start by imposing a 2 percent federal tax on every dollar of an individual’s net worth over $50 million, adding a percent more on every dollar above $1 billion in net assets. Over time, the tax rates could be increased, and the amounts they cover lowered, to fund new or expanded public programs.

…

What the president and others talking tax fairness conveniently fail to mention is that their definition of the wealthy’s undertaxed income includes paper gains on investments, what neither Congress nor the IRS has ever considered real income until the underlying assets have been sold. According to a 2023 study by the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent of taxpayers actually pay an average income tax rate of 26 percent, the top half an average rate of 14.8 percent, and the bottom half an average 3.1 percent tax rate.

Read it.

Last week, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Jordan Peterson helped expose the failures of Illinois’ public education system on X. Their engagement with a Wirepoints report, “Illinois education 2022: Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools,” revealed the thousands of students trapped in completely failing schools in 2022.

But those results are now old news. Wirepoints has just run the new Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) 2023 Report Card data and the outcomes are worse even though the impacts of covid are another year behind us.

In 2023, there were 67 Illinois schools where not a single student tested proficient in math and 32 where no student tested proficient in reading. What’s worse, officials in those schools graduated nearly 70% of their students.

Read it.

The names of those involved in creating a false consensus based on inaccurate information have become an infamous reminder of the dangers of excessive reliance on a few politically motivated individuals: Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jerome Adams, Deborah Birx, and later entries like Ashish Jha and Vivek Murthy.

There were a host of others who had a significant impact on the rampant spread of indefensible, immediately disproven ideas, mandates, and policies.

Many continue into 2024 to advocate for failed policies, “interventions” that still don’t work, and unnecessary panic. And all with the willing participation of major media outlets dedicated to continuing their preferred narratives. For example, those who support the endless Covid vaccination series over natural immunity.

Read it.

The University of California (San Francisco) is under fire this week after hosting a racist speaker who attacked white people as psychopaths and claimed that black women can be legally raped. A conservative campus group posted clips from the event in which author Dante King lambasted the United States and its institutions as racist and maintaining a white “rape culture.”

Read it.

The second verse, same as the first. In a continuation of their blackout from the previous evening, the Tuesday morning newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC absolutely refused to acknowledge the fact that the attempted mass shooter at the Lakewood megachurch in Houston, Texas was transgender, who would go by male and female names; a fact disclosed by authorities during a press conference.

What they did make sure to note, rightly, was that the shooter was anti-Semitic and a supporter of Palestine. “And it’s that anti-Semitic material combined with the fact authorities saw the word ‘Palestine’ written on the shooter’s rifle, which has them saying that they are not ruling out terrorism or a hate crime as a potential motivating cause here,” NBC correspondent Morgan Chesky announced on the Today show.

Read it.

If white men are the problem, well, let’s see how well the country gets along without them.

Read it.

In what has become a tradition, Oxfam issued a report at the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, complaining about “growing and extreme inequality.” The report states that “The world’s five richest men have seen their fortunes more than double since 2020, while in the same period five billion people have become poorer.”

There is just one problem: those figures don’t add up. Swedish researcher Johan Norberg has explained that the UBS “Global Wealth Report,” which is “the main source for Oxfam’s wealth calculations,” reveals that, “For the world as a whole, these annual shifts have roughly cancelled out, leaving global wealth inequality back at the level prevailing when the pandemic began.” Norberg adds that, “For most inequality indicators, [this] was the lowest level recorded this century.”

Looking only at the five people who did the best in a given period will always give the impression Oxfam wants to create. In doing so, the NGO—which has an obsession with the so-called Gini index, an inequality comparison method invented by an Italian fascist—ignores the 24 rich people who disappeared from the Forbes list after losing $43 billion in one year.