Read it.

The family of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sounding off about this year’s class of honorees for a female leadership award named after the liberal icon.

Not unlike the feelings of the families of people who create and fund foundations (Rockefeller, Ford) and see the trustees of such foundations underwrite all sorts of Woke shit that the creators would have found offensive. Welcome to our world, proglodytes.

Read it.

The open??fields doctrine gives government vast powers to invade nearly 96 percent of all US private land.

Terry Rainwaters owns 136 acres of rural land in northwest Tennessee. He lives on the property with his son, rents a second house on the property to long??term tenants, and farms the property commercially. Because he values his privacy, he has a locked gate posted with “no trespassing” signs at the entrance to the property.

Nevertheless, for years Tennessee wildlife officers have entered his land, roamed around in camouflage, spied on his son while he was hunting, and even installed a surveillance camera in a tree—all without consent, a warrant, or even probable cause.

The officers think they can treat Rainwaters’s private land like public property because of a state statute that allows them to “go upon any property, outside of buildings, posted or otherwise” to enforce hunting regulations. This statute embodies a legal rule called the open??fields doctrine, which gives government officials a blank check to enter private land whenever and however they please.

During Prohibition, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment—which typically requires officials to get a warrant before searching private property—does not protect “open fields.” Despite its name, the open??fields doctrine covers far more than fields. It applies to nearly all private land that does not immediately surround a home.

The American Mind.

ederalism is being tested in ways not seen in more than a century. The Biden Administration has openly refused any real effort to slow illegal entries, while as many as 13 million foreigners have crossed illegally since his inauguration. It took Texas longer than it should have to grasp that they were actually working to facilitate illegal entries. Eventually, though, Governor Greg Abbott recognized that the Lone Star State would have to act alone against Biden’s open border policy. After he implemented aggressive actions to stop the flow, the feds went to extraordinary measures to ensure that the border would remain open, cutting razor wire placed along the Rio Grande and doggedly fighting Abbott’s policies in federal court.

A major escalation occurred when the governor formally declared the situation an “invasion.” Predictably, Democrats howled at the use of a term with such rhetorical force. But if “invasion” is a faithful characterization of what is happening, then we have an obligation to call it that. And if there is an invasion at the southern border, then it must be stopped by all means—whether by federal intervention or in defiance of it.

What exactly constitutes an “invasion”? What are the characteristics that have defined invasions throughout human history? I propose that there are five. The first is that an invasion is something that the inhabitants of the nation being invaded never requested or invited. Second, invading forces are comprised predominantly of military-aged men. Third, invaders are primarily motivated by self-interest. Fourth, invaders carry the insignia of their home nations with them. And, finally, an invasion must pose a genuine threat to the existing social order of the place being invaded. With these criteria in mind, let’s examine the situation at our southern border.

Read it.

Five Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas, and Biden has sent no troops to help them, but at the State of the Union address, he promised to send troops to build a pier for Gaza.

The estimated over 1,000 troops will spend as long as 2 months laboring to build a floating pier in a war zone under potential attack to help transfer aid to the Hamas supporters living in Gaza.

Nothing about this plan makes sense.

Read it.

catastrophic wave of violent crime committed by illegal immigrants. This comes amid the ten million migrants that have invaded the nation, alongside recent calls from radical progressive lawmakers across crime-ridden metro areas to defund the police and limit criminal prosecution. As a result, many law-abiding Americans express growing concern about insecurity amid a new era of explosive crime and chaos.

Let’s begin with a series of news headlines that show Chilean crime gangs have been on a nationwide burglary spree, targeting wealthy neighborhoods from coast to coast.

Scott Adams regularly complains on his Coffee With Scott Adams podcast that South American gangs are targeting upscale homes in his neighborhood in California.

Ars Technica.

Cellulose is the primary component of the cell walls of plants, making it the most common polymer on Earth. It’s responsible for the properties of materials like wood and cotton and is the primary component of dietary fiber, so it’s hard to overstate its importance to humanity.

Given its ubiquity and the fact that it’s composed of a bunch of sugar molecules linked together, its toughness makes it very difficult to use as a food source. The animals that manage to extract significant calories from cellulose typically do so via specialized digestive tracts that provide a home for symbiotic bacteria—think of the extra stomachs of cows and other ruminants.

“The law of supply and demand is not taught in Gender Studies.” — “Red Pill Guy”

Power Line.

Sen. Alex Padilla, the California Democrat appointed to fill Kamala Harris’s Senate seat after she became vice president, wants Americans to be more certain to register to vote by linking it with free tax preparation. Padilla is leading a push for the U.S. Treasury Department to provide voter registration services at federally funded centers that prepare taxes for low- to moderate-income people, disabled people and people with limited English at no cost to them.

“Limited English,” like “undocumented” or “migrant,” is code for those illegally present in the United States. Federal law bars illegals from voting but Sen. Padilla helps them violate the law. As California’s secretary of state he deployed the “motor voter” plan that registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the weird things about the Cloud people is how they talk about history as if it is a spirit force or a god. In his State of the Union speech, Biden kept saying things like “history is watching us” and “history requires us” as if “history” was the name of the guy controlling the simulation. He is not the only one who does this. In fact, he never talked like this until the rest of the Cloud people started doing it.

One reason for talking about history this way is it gives them a false sense of moral authority for their various schemes. They claim that history moves toward some paradise, so if their schemes advance us toward that paradise, then they must be on the side of history. It is all nonsense, of course, but nonsense has been the fuel of fanatics and lunatics since the dawn of time.

Even with a sober-minded ruling class, however, there would still be this need to shape history so that the present feels inevitable. Much of what has brought us to the present crisis is the shaping of history to fit the causes of the moment. Our progressive ruling class has been rewriting history since Gettysburg, maybe even since the Battle of Naseby, because the future is certain, but the past is unpredictable.

The Antiplanner.

“What drives Republican opposition to transit?” asks Governing magazine. I’ve often wondered the reverse of this question: Why do Democrats support transit?

Governing‘s implicit assumption is that transit is a good thing and anyone opposed must have some warped reason to question it. The magazine’s answer is that opposition to transit reflects an urban-rural divide and since Republicans are more likely to represent rural areas that get less or no transit service than urban areas, they have little reason to support it. This belief may be why the Federal Transit Administration is so eager to support rural transit as it is a way to co-opt more political support for transit in general.

Read it.

For the sons of this world are, for their own generation, more prudent than the sons of light.

— Luke 16:8

Read it.

A growing unease is setting in among Brussels’ Eurocrats as a rightist wave is predicted to sweep Europe’s upcoming parliamentary elections in June.

This has however failed to deter some from doubling down on the massively unpopular ‘net zero’ policies that are partly responsible for putting EU elites in their precarious positions in the first place.

In an interview on Tuesday, the EU Commission’s climate chief, Wopke Hoekstra, told Politico that whatever the outcome of these elections, afterward, Brussels must “focus just as much and probably more” on climate action.

His remarks came on the heels of Monday’s first-ever report from the European Environment Agency (EEA), which predicts a climate apocalypse should EU governments slack off in their efforts.

New York Post.

The term “long COVID” should be tossed aside like a stack of expired N95 masks — that’s according to health experts in one country, who found that symptoms of those reportedly suffering a year on weren’t any different than your typical virus, such as the flu.

Government-backed medical researchers in Australia say it’s time to stop using the fear-inducing phrase, which became popular after high volumes of people testing positive for COVID-19 led to a surge in generally non-severe “virus fatigue symptoms” that would normally have gone unnoticed, South West News Service reported.

Read it.

The Biden administration renewed a sanctions waiver against the Iranian regime Wednesday that unlocks billions of dollars in previously frozen funds, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

The administration’s sanctions waiver, extended for another four months, allows Tehran access to $10 billion in previously frozen Iranian revenues collected from electricity exports, according to The Washington Free Beacon, which viewed the renewal notice.

“Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”  — 18 U.S.C. s. 2381.

Read it.

Back in 2018, President Donald Trump referred to Haiti as a “s**thole,” and was roundly denounced for being a racist. While watching a clip of a “cannibal gang” member eating a piece of roasted human leg on the streets of Port-au-Prince the other night (it’s revolting; you have been warned), it struck me that Trump’s judgment has held up pretty well.

Turd World is as Turd World does.

ZMan waxes nostalgic.

Baltimore combines the mindset of the postal clerk with the intellectual dexterity of the population.

And they call it the Green Party … why?

YouTube.

Chapelle characterizes Trump as “an honest liar”.

Read it.

Many American, British, European and other foreign-born men and women have long served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and often they are dual citizens. As an example, earlier this week Israel announced the death of 19-year old Sgt. Itay Chen, a dual US-Israeli citizen who had been serving in the IDF, at the hands of Hamas.

But South Africa, which brought an International Criminal Court (ICC) case against Israel over allegations of genocide against Palestinians, has issued a new declaration forbidding its citizens from joining or assisting in any way with the Israeli military.

Read it.

Celebrities are being targeted across France in an unprecedented wave of “home-jackings,” which are burglaries accompanied by violence and kidnapping. The cases often involve “youths” recruited by experienced ringleaders, such as Kamel Z., who keep their distance from their criminal underlings to insulate themselves from any prosecution.

The country has a history of these violent home invasions, but recent months have seen an explosion of such cases, including well-known French figures, such as Vitaa, Bruno Guillon, Jean-François Piège, Anne-Sophie Lapix, and Nikos Aliagas.

Power Line.

As John notes, blue collar workers or minorities voting for policies that actually help them is an important trend, and a complement to Steve’s post about the border problem. As he showed, “immigration” helped to flip California from red to blue in presidential elections, so Democrats seek to repeat that trend “across the entire country.” That’s why Biden has brought in millions, and that’s a problem.

The possibility of becoming a public charge can cancel the prospect of legal immigrants becoming legitimate American citizens. On the other hand, for many illegals becoming a public charge is the goal. The ideal set-up is to get on welfare and work under the table for cash. That’s what enables the transfer of more than $63 billion to Mexico in 2023, a seven-percent hike from the previous year. In effect, the USA subsidizes the Mexican government.

Those on welfare have a problem becoming U.S. citizens and that’s what California attorney general Xavier Becerra was on about when he cited 10 million “immigrants” in California alone. It is illegal for foreign nationals and even registered aliens to vote, but California’s “motor voter” program registers false-documented illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license. Squads of politiqueros bribe, coerce and threaten the illegals to vote “a certain way,” code for Democrats.

Read it.

A Republican secretary of state sent a letter this week to the Department of Justice (DOJ) alerting it to an executive order signed in 2021 that he says will allow felons and illegal aliens to register to vote in elections.

In the letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Republican Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson wrote that a Biden-signed executive order has led to agencies under Mr. Garland’s charge “attempting to register people to vote, including potentially ineligible felons and to co-opt state and local officials into accomplishing this goal.”

Gates of Vienna.

Based on the following article, the Culture Wars in Germany are at least as advanced as they are here in the Woke States of America. As far as “Deconstructing Whiteness” goes, Germany may even be ahead of us.

Read it.

In a crime-ridden metro area just north of the Washington, DC swap, dominated by radical progressives, it comes as no surprise that the mayor recently appointed a “racial equity” leader who openly supports violence and advocates for a revolution.

Read it.

How convenient.

Read it.

When criminals are not punished, crime increases. (Not part of ‘Democrat math’.)

The Spectator.

Are children more likely to be abused in a homeschool environment than in a public school?

That key question has emerged in response to the recent surge of parents who have chosen to homeschool their children. Late last year, I wrote in this newsletter about an anti-homeschooling series by the Washington Post. The Post series argued that parents regularly use homeschooling as a shield for abuse, most aggressively in an article headlined “What home schooling hides: a boy tortured and starved by his stepmom.”

“Most schools have teachers, principals, guidance counselors — professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent. Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of such people,” the article says. “The research… suggests that when abuse does occur in homeschool families, it can escalate into especially severe forms — and that some parents exploit lax home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies.”

There are several serious problems with the “research” presented by the Post. One study only collected data from six school districts across a period of a few years to claim half of students who are homeschooled were removed from school after an allegation of abuse at home. Not only is this not a representative sample of homeschooled kids, but it also lumps in substantiated with unsubstantiated allegations of abuse. The Post cites another survey of children who ended up in the hospital with signs of torture. About half of them had been homeschooled. The sample size? Seventeen children.

The Foundry.

something in his budget for everyone—everyone who loves tax hikes, that is.

Biden would raise taxes by $5 trillion over 10 years, and—based on his budget—would allow an additional $2 trillion of middle-class tax cuts to expire after 2025. Between 2023 and 2034, tax receipts would rise by 95%, according to the White House.

Biden would aim most of the new taxes at small and big businesses, entrepreneurs, investors, and job and wealth creators.

Middle-class workers and consumers would be devastated by the economic collateral damage.

The Biden administration acts as if business capital is an endless fountain that will never run dry, no matter how much the government siphons out of it, and as if no matter how severely they’re taxed, investors will invest just as much, and businesses will keep building, hiring, and raising salaries.

Read it.

In Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, the former Greek minister of finance, Yannis Varoufakis, argues that wealth accumulation is no longer defined by capitalist relations. The book is at pains to address objections that current conditions represent a post-capitalist system because it assumes a Marxist audience disposed to understand capitalism as a pre-socialist rather than neo-feudal phase of history. Capitalism was supposed to mark the end of human exploitation before something better, not the antechamber to something worse.

Varoufakis’s argument for the global economy being post-capitalist is that it no longer principally relies on the pursuit of profits under conditions of market competition but on rent extraction, the way that feudalism did. He sees this as resulting from a recent de facto privatization of the Internet, like a new enclosure of the commons (despite 18th–century enclosures actually inaugurating capitalism).

Large platforms like Amazon, on which the capitalist has to sell his products to be competitive, or social media, where he has to advertise, would be new fiefdoms, and the capitalist paying rent to use them to make money would be a vassal.

There is nothing new under the sun. The hard part is coming up with new names for the same old shit.

Read it.

The U.S. Military Academy no longer will use the motto “Duty, Honor, Country” as its mission statement, according to West Point’s superintendent.

I guess reality finally caught up with them.

UPDATE: Duty, Honor, Country … Gone

Read it.

The trial of a Muslim immigrant accused of killing two and seriously injuring nine at a 2022 LGBT festival in Norway started on Tuesday in Oslo. According to prosecutors, Zaniar Matapour, a 44-year-old Iranian immigrant of Kurdish background, fired ten rounds with what police described as an automatic weapon and eight rounds with a handgun into crowds. If found guilty, he is facing 30 years in prison.

Matapour has consistently refused to cooperate with investigators and did not agree to have interviews taped unless recordings of his interviews were released in their entirety to the public “with no time delay so it won’t be censored or manipulated.”

The trial opened with Matapour refusing to identify himself to the judge, instead interrupting by questioning why the trial was scheduled during Ramadan and was actively held on Fridays—the Muslim holy day—while taking a break “during Saturday and Sunday which are Christian and Jewish holy days, and for example Easter.”

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Special Counsel Robert Hur testified for some five hours before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday on his investigation into President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents over his too long career in public life. I have posted the Washington Post’s YouTube video of the hearing at the bottom. At the same time, transcripts of Hur’s interview of Biden in the investigation were released: October 8 (99 pages) and October 9 (157 pages).

Mr. Techno Fog provided his hot take on the transcripts here (“confusion, evasion, and outright lies”). David Harsanyi cut to the chase in the Federalist column “Turns out Biden lied.” The Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr reviews both Hur’s testimony and the Biden transcripts in “Interview Transcript, Congressional Testimony Shed Light on Biden’s Memory Lapses During Classified Doc Investigation.”

Me, too.

Quilette.

The concept of race, we are often told, is a social construct with no basis in biological reality. Some have argued that it was invented by white Europeans for the express purpose of constructing a racial hierarchy in order to justify slavery. According to cultural critic Kenan Malik, “Racism gave birth to race. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They became classified as a distinct, and inferior, race as a means of justifying their enslavement.” This view is even espoused by some scientific institutions.

And yet, by analysing your genome, companies like 23andMe can describe your ancestry, and their reports match people’s own accounts of their racial ancestry to a high degree of accuracy. As humans spread across the globe, they tended to breed within ancestral groups, such that gene flow within groups became greater than gene flow between groups. This led to a pattern of “shared-ancestry clustering” that is still apparent across the world—as a result, we can usually differentiate at a glance between people whose ancestry can be traced back multiple generations in, say, Japan, from those whose ancestors came from Ethiopia or Norway. It is these clusterings that we refer to by the term “race”—a common-language term that predates Enlightenment science.

Despite the fact that there is obviously some biological underpinning to what we call “race,” many people claim that “races” are purely sociological. They argue that races could only be real if they were clearly demarcated, discrete categories and thus countable, or that for races to be real, they must be essentialist categories: i.e., there must be at least one trait shared by all the people of Race A and by no one who is not of Race A.

In support of this, leading geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that genes vary just as much within a race as between races. While this is true, it does not negate the reality of races. Our ancestry is manifest in correlated patterns of genetic variation, and these correlated patterns are both real and meaningful and reveal our ancestral groupings. Furthermore, while many dismiss race as only skin deep, AI software can discern a patient’s race just by analysing medical X-rays. The AI cannot just be reflecting human bias when it does so, since it is discerning patterns of which human experts are unaware.

Read it.

Some Americans install heat pumps because they care about climate change. But most people aren’t going to make the switch until it makes sense economically. Pinpointing where and for whom heat pumps are a good investment is surprisingly tricky because U.S. housing is so diverse, with a wide range of building sizes and ages, situated in different local climates with different utility rates.

But for the first time, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab have sorted through much of this complexity to get deeper to the truth about the costs, benefits, and challenges of deploying heat pumps in the U.S.

Ultimately, they found that heat pumps are a cost-effective choice in roughly 65 million U.S. homes, or about 60% of the country — and that’s before taking into account available subsidies. But there are substantial economic barriers to widespread adoption.

Read it.

How do nations become post-Christian? To quote Ernest Hemingway: Gradually, and then suddenly.

For decades, the United States has been a bastion of religiosity, bucking the trend of secularization, but in recent years, the needle has begun to move. According to a 2019 poll, between 20% and 25% of American adults now identify as ‘nones’ (meaning that they do not identify with any religion), a percentage that is higher among younger adults than older adults and likely indicative of a long-term trend. According to a 2020 Politico/Morning Consult poll, 49% of voting-age Gen Z (those born after 1996) respondents identified as either agnostic or atheist—a sea change in religious identification.

To unpack those numbers a bit further, consider that a 2017 survey found that only 11% of Americans claimed to have read the entire Bible—meaning that a whopping 89% have not. Thus, it is no surprise that even Americans who still identify as Christian are abandoning any semblance of orthodoxy, with 40% of American Christians claiming that the Bible is ‘ambiguous’ on abortion, 34% rejecting the biblical definition of marriage, and another 34% claiming that abortion is morally acceptable.

Read it.

And, of course, guaranteeing to get Paul’s vote(s), which is the whole point.

Axios.

New data shows that Democrats’ longtime advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than 60 years — creating a massive vulnerability for President Biden and congressional Democrats.

Why it matters: One of the most loyal parts of the Democratic coalition is suddenly in danger. Black and Hispanic men could vote Republican in numbers not seen since President Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in the 1950s.

The big picture: Latinos, the nation’s largest non-white group, still lean Democratic. But they’ve been shifting Republican over the last two decades, and are no longer the slam-dunk Democrats they were in 1960 when JFK ran for president.

Read it.

The Biden administration is preparing to run the 2024 election on abortion. With a miserable economy and failure on every side, that is the one thing still left for the Democrats to run on.

But no generation has ever had less use for abortion than this one.

After the end of Roe v. Wade, Democrats warned of a decline in abortions, what they failed to mention was that abortions had been declining long before the Supreme Court decision.

After Roe v. Wade first came on the scene, abortions shot up all through the 80s and hit a peak in 1990 with 1.6 million. Then, just as the Democrats decided to go all-in on abortion, purging their pro-life wing, abortion rates crashed, and now struggle to pass the million mark.

Read it.

A University of Pennsylvania professor who cheered on Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel is suing the school in an attempt to stop a federal investigation into its response to campus anti-Semitism.

Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature at Penn’s Middle East Center, filed her suit against the school Saturday. It accuses Penn of cracking down on anti-Israel speech and aims to stop the transfer of university documents to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), sent a letter to Penn leaders in January requesting their internal deliberations on anti-Semitic campus incidents.

Penn is cooperating with the request and began submitting documents to the committee last month. Fakhreddine—a vocal critic of the Jewish state who praised “Palestine” for “inventing a new way of life” on Oct. 7—wants the school to stop, citing privacy concerns.

Read it.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) wants to declare racism a “public health crisis,” the symptoms of which include “microaggressions” and the “forms of violence” that black Americans face when “jogging in neighborhoods.”

Brown on Monday introduced “a resolution declaring racism a public health crisis,” which calls for “a nationwide strategy to address health disparities and inequities across all sectors in society.” The resolution does not offer strategies for “dismantling systemic practices and policies that perpetuate racism” but does call for “governments to engage significant resources to empower the communities that are impacted.”

It’s a potentially risky resolution for Brown, one of the Senate’s staunchest progressives, who faces a tough reelection bid in a state that swung for former president Donald Trump by more than 7 points in 2020. Brown, who votes with President Joe Biden 98 percent of the time, has attempted to position himself as a defender of blue-collar workers.

The greatest threat to the health of black people is a black teenage gang-banger is a gun. I don’t see any mention of it in the Senator’s plans.

NPR.

Considering the number of black athetes in college accused of sexual assault, this might prove a big win for Florida.

Read it.

I guess they’re running out of Muslim hate groups to crack down on. Ya think?

PETA.

Ahead of the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, PETA sent a letter to Dr. Jill Biden today asking the first lady to modernize the celebration by replacing eggs with dyed Easter potatoes. PETA notes that an annual “White House Potato Roll” would please everyone who doesn’t eat these cholesterol bombs for health, cultural, religious, or environmental reasons or because they don’t want to support filthy factory farms, where hundreds of millions of hens are confined to cages smaller than a letter-size sheet of paper, unable to stretch even one wing. In starch contrast, potatoes are cheaper and healthier than eggs and leave birds in peace.

I rather suspect that everybody working for PETA is pro-abortion. I guess a bird’s egg is more worthy of respect than a human egg.

Of course, if ‘Dr.’ Jill Biden is in need of a vegetable to roll, Creepy Joe is right to hand.

Read it.

“Effective immediately, I have been removed (banned) from the next 3 NXXT tournaments that I already signed up for and been approved to play,” wrote transgender golfer Hailey Davidson last week.

The message came after he/she was removed from the NXXT Women’s Pro Tour, who has now announced that participants must be “a biological female at birth” to participate in its events, according to Fox News and the NY Post.

Davidson expressed his/her discontent because he/she was already crushing the woman’s field: “They changed their policy mid season, after me signing up already and being 2nd in Player of the Year race.”

Read it.

Joe Biden has claimed that his opponents are assaulting democracy on the basis of the January 6, 2020, buffoonish riot.

Aside from the fact that storming the Capitol Rotunda sometimes is apparently deemed permissible – as in the recent pro-Hamas takeover of it – or aside from the fact that disrupting a federal government proceeding is deemed exempt – as in the recent pro-Hamas throng that blocked the route of the presidential motorcade and thus delayed the State of the Union address to the nation by 26 minutes – who really is attacking democracy?

Joel Kotkin.

In a way unimaginable in Europe, or even the eastern United States, the Golden State has long been, as one nineteenth century Gentile observer put it, “the Jews’ earthly paradise.” California, settled late and distant from the East Coast, had no entrenched WASP power elite, allowing Jews to achieve economic and political pre-eminence unheard of at that time.

Today, progressive California offers a less appealing landscape. The community that produced Levi Strauss, Hollywood, and numerous Silicon Valley billionaires faces increased hostility—in the political realm, at the universities and schools, on the streets, in literary circles, and even with antisemitic graffiti sprayed on the bathroom walls of coffee houses.

The growing hostility toward Israel and Jews here originates, as elsewhere, from Middle Eastern students, resident Muslims, and university professors. But, increasingly, it has extended to the grassroots level, at city councils and school boards. Almost all this opposition comes not from the Right, the historic base for antisemitism, but almost entirely from the progressive Left.

Read it.

Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla said in a recent television appearance that so-called Christian nationalists believe our rights “come from God,” rather than “any earthly authority.”

After getting eviscerated online, she backpedaled to nuance her position. After all, Thomas Jefferson would qualify under her definition, since he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights … .”

But rather than clarify her point, she retreated into vagueness and equivocation—all the better to camouflage her own parochial views.

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Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul’s subway bag checks continue to make headlines as she has banned the National Guard from carrying rifles while in the subway system.

Well, that’s all right, then.

Perhaps they ought to wear smiley-face armbands, just to be sure.