Read it.

The clear message from the people and the Court is that admission should be based upon merit. But those running the University of California (UC) maintain their obsession with race and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). They are undeterred in their mission to enforce equity via affirmative action. Rather than complying with the law and the will of the people, they search for loopholes to achieve the racial balancing they deem ideal for the shaping of society.

The most recent example comes from its San Diego campus (UCSD) which implemented a rule that discriminates against students whose parents make more than a certain amount of money or who went to college. It just so happens that this rule greatly advantages black and Latino students. In a nice side benefit for the administrators, it hurts Asians, who are already overrepresented at the UCs (as well as most universities, as addressed in the Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which specifically addressed discrimination against Asian students.)

Beginning next year, certain “selective” majors (such as biology and most engineering degrees, including computer science) will have a special selection criteria at UCSD. “The selection?criteria for entry to the major will?consider academic achievement in the specified screening courses and will also be aligned with UC San Diego’s priorities of serving California residents, first-generation college students, and students from low-income families.” Thus, UCSD, without any direction from its constituents, has decided that it should prioritize students based on the status of their parents.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Dora Moutot is a committed feminist. She was deputy editor-in-chief of Konbini, a website aimed at young people. She has a degree in arts and fashion.

“The hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing.” — James Sexton

Watch his interview with Chris Williamson

Read it.

DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” your history of DEI activities, and how you will implement DEI initiatives if you get the admission/job/grant. I have posted quite a bit about them (see collection here), and object to them because they are not only compelled speech and are often completely irrelevant to what you’re applying for, but also ignore the fact that there are many ways to make contributions to society beyond enacting DEI. (For example, what about a college applicant who has taught illiterate adults to read?) And I think many institutions are eliminating them. For one thing, some of them may violate the recent Supreme Court decision on race-based admission. Now MIT has joined the statement-eliminators.

Read it.

The surge of pro-Hamas “protesters” on American campuses has some pundits puzzled. On the other hand, past events help explain the dynamics in play. On August 3, 1981, some 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), walked off their jobs. “They are in violation of the law,” said President Ronald Reagan, “and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.” Two days later, President Reagan fired and replaced the strikers. As one wag put it, the PATCO strikers must have thought Reagan was a college president and would cave to their demands. That’s what’s going on now.

Read it.

Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, has provided a forensic analysis of the videos and evidence emerging from Iran’s 13th April swarm drone and missile ‘demonstration’ attack into Israel: A ‘message’, rather than an ‘assault’.

The leading Israeli daily, Yediot Ahoronot, has estimated the cost of attempting to down this Iranian flotilla at between $2-3 billion dollars. The implications of this single number are substantial.

Read it.

California lawmakers are considering a bill that would give preference to African American applicants seeking occupational licenses, for such professions as teaching, nursing, counseling, electrical work and others, especially those who are descendants of slaves.

California never had slavery, but that’s where the Democrats are, so that’s where racial preferences and ‘reparations’ are being pushed.

Time to leave.

Read it.

A Texas high school yearbook has sparked outrage among the community, particularly its Jewish members, for including a “Times of Palestine” page that notably glosses over the ramifications of a Hamas terror assault on Israel, which claimed the lives of over 1,200 individuals, the N.Y. Post reports.

Houston’s Bellaire High School, which has a large population of Jewish students, features a section labeled “Times of Palestine” in its 2024 yearbook that omits crucial details regarding the Oct. 7 attack. The account provides a perspective of the Israel-Gaza conflict by an Arab student.

The page emerges amid tensions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and includes the page ostensibly as an Arab student’s narrative “of the Israel-Gaza conflict.”

Major urban areas are dominated by Democrats, even in red states like Texas. Austin is the poster child for this situation, but Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio are just as bad.

Read it.

State Farm, California’s largest insurance provider, announced it would not renew insurance policies for approximately 72,000 homes and apartments in the state beginning this summer.

In March, State Farm stated that it would discontinue coverage for around 30,000 homes and 42,000 apartments, citing surging costs, increasing risks of disasters such as wildfires, and outdated insurance rules as reasons for terminating the policies, per the Associated Press.

Play Democrat games, win Democrat prizes.

Read it.

What was the “intent to commit another crime or aid and conceal the commission thereof” that prosecutors used to raise falsification of business records from a misdemeanor to a felony? In nearly every case of alleged falsification of records that has been charged as a felony in New York, the defendant was charged with another crime — that is, prosecutors made it clear what the other crime was. In Trump’s case, the indictment did not specify any other crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the law did not require him to specify the other crime.

So Trump faced felony charges without knowing what he was accused of doing. And the really amazing thing is that the trial is now underway and Bragg has still not specified what the other crime is. It is a key element of the case. Without it, the charges against Trump could never have been brought because they were misdemeanors long past the statute of limitations. It is the other crime that makes this whole prosecution possible. But the prosecutor has not specified what it is.

If that sounds vaguely unconstitutional to you, you’re right. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, the Fifth Amendment “requires a felony charge to be spelled out in an indictment whose criminal elements have been established by probable cause to the satisfaction of a grand jury.” The problem, McCarthy continues, is that the election-stealing conspiracy Bragg’s prosecutors are accusing Trump of engaging in is “not charged in the indictment” and, further, “there is no such conspiracy crime in New York penal law.” McCarthy also argues that the charges violate the New York Constitution.

It’s a political witch-hunt, pure and simple.

House of Eratosthenes.

Internet phenomena are rather like campfire fuel: Some are like wet logs, you can sit there until your butt gets tired trying magnifying glasses, matches, Bic lighters, whatever have you, putting unlimited effort into it — and some people do! Nothing happens. They end up embarrassing themselves and tiring out their butts. Other things are like gasoline, the white variety, burning so fast that there’s no time for the flame to take to the wood and the accelerant can’t do anything but forcefully explode.

Most are in between the two extremes. This dumb bear thing is more like the latter. Match, toss, kaboom. I think it can be truthfully said, in all my Internet years, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I wish that every female who would rather meet a bear than a man in the woods would to ahead and do that. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Despite the fact that the world is teetering on the edge of global conflict, US college campuses being trashed by radical occupiers, and criminal illegals are still overwhelming the border, Joe Biden spent Friday afternoon awarding other Democrats medals.

Biden, who was incapable of saying ‘Presidential Medal of Freedom,’ awarded one each to Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and Rep. Jim Clyburn.

Read it.

A health crisis has emerged for Democrat officials in Long Beach, California, following a tuberculosis outbreak linked to a hotel housing ‘homeless’ people, according to Fox News.

On Thursday, health officials declared a public health emergency after an alarming tuberculosis outbreak was reported at an unnamed hotel housing.

The city has so far confirmed 14 cases of tuberculosis in people “associated with a single room occupancy hotel.” Nine of them were hospitalized with one fatal case. Another 170 people were “likely exposed” to the deadly bacteria.

Read it.

A member of the House Democrats’ progressive “Squad” is under fire for hosting fundraiser with extremist Muslim leader who praised Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team admitted on Friday that key evidence in Trump’s classified documents case was altered or manipulated – leaving two different chronologies; one that was digitally scanned vs. what’s in the actual boxes.

Smith also misled the court, after originally telling U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained “in their original, intact form as seized,” when in a footnote they conceded that they removed classified documents and left placeholder sheets, which prosecutors acknowledged has created an “inconsistent” record – in which some of the documents are no longer in the same order as they appear in digital scans made in the fall of 2022.

“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote reads, according to Just the News.

NPR.

Play terrorist games, get terrorist prizes.

“MOOMMMMEEEEE! David hit me BACK!”

Gabe Bult.

Austin Williams.

The military has a technical term for people who call attention to themselves.

They’re called ‘targets’.

Read it.

An Italian-flagged vessel funded by a German NGO has joined the fleet of so-called ‘rescue boats’ that operate on the Mediterranean Sea, and stands accused by the Italian government of colluding with people smugglers to bring as many migrants as possible to Italy.

Maldusa, an Italian pro-migration cultural association, supported by German NGOs ProAsyl and United4Rescue, has announced that its speedboat, which is smaller than regular coast guard patrol boats, has set sail on the Mediterranean. Its aim, they declared, is not to rescue, but to “monitor the waters around Lampedusa, to prevent shipwrecks and other forms of border violence, and facilitate the freedom of movement of all those trying to reach Europe.”

StrategyPage.

Worldwide military spending reached a record $2.443 trillion in 2023. This was an increase of 6.8 per cent since 2022. This was the largest year-to-year increase since 2009. Global defense spending passed two trillion dollars a year in 2021. The nations with the largest defense budgets remain the same. In 2023 the top ten spenders were the United States, China, India, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea. As usual the United States accounted for the largest amount of global spending, 38 percent of it. China came in at 14 percent while India has 3.6 percent. The number ten nation, South Korea, had 2.4 percent. Russia, long the number two spender has not fallen to number five with 3.2 percent of world spending. The rest of the world, which has about 170 nations, account for 25.3 percent of global defense spending. The current global superpowers are the United States and China, with China a distant second to the Americans.

The American Mind.

Mercenaries are, of course, nothing new. Wars tend to beguile adventurers and some of them are going to be foreigners attracted to the possibility of financial reward, if not ideology. Iraq and Afghanistan had plenty of guns for hire, providing technical services or working as protective security details. In my time in Iraq, I recall seeing Americans, South Africans, Chileans, and Nepalese (Gurkhas) serving in such capacities. According to the Russians, there are over three thousand foreign mercenaries serving with the Ukrainians, with particularly large contingents from the United States, France, and Canada. On the Russian side in the Ukraine War, we’ve seen evidence of African, Syrian, and Cuban mercenaries.

And while the white mercenaries of Africa are legendary, or notorious, the case should be made that they were outnumbered by African and other mercenaries. Rwandan soldiers on missions in the Congo and Central African Republic essentially behaved as rapacious mercenaries, looking to benefit financially from the conflict. And there were few supporters of African and Arab mercenaries, of men with guns for hire, as assiduous as the late Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. The consequences of Qaddafi-funded mercenary forces such as the Islamic Legion and the Volcano Army would reverberate for decades, helping to stoke the genocidal war in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Read it.

Attorneys general representing half of the country on May 1 sued President Joe Biden’s administration over a new rule requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales, including private sales.

Read it.

The parole program allowed over 200,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua to enter the United States between January and August 2023. The program did not cover the cost of flights, but allowed them to enter and travel independently.

In a recent development, a House Committee subpoena has forced the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reveal details of its parole program designed to allow entry for thousands of individuals from several nations.

Read it.

Iowa will face legal consequences if it enforces a recently passed immigration law that prohibits people from being in the state if they were previously denied entry into the United States, the Des Moines Register reported.

Read it.

On January 6, 2021, tens of thousands of Americans descended on Washington to protest the counts and Covid-related conditions of the 2020 election. A riot took place at the US Capitol. Over 1,200 people were arrested and more than 460 were incarcerated. The coverage of that day in the mainstream media is typified by headlines like this from the New York Times, Forbes and Washington Post.

Read it.

A self-described “rebel alliance” operates a website that reacts in real time to the protests roiling college campuses across the country with analysis and instruction on the benefits of digging in and escalating violence, especially as it pertains to law enforcement.

Read it.

The school psychologist for Indianapolis Public Schools was among those held when police arrested 14 masked adults who blocked traffic last month. They were charged with obstructing traffic April 25 at 10:30 a.m. on Meridian Street.

A psychologist for Indianapolis Public Schools was among those held when police arrested 14 masked adults who officers said were blocking traffic late last month just outside the Governor’s Residence in the state capital.

The school psychologist, Karisa Cole, and the other arrested protesters were charged with obstructing traffic April 25 at 10:30 a.m. on Meridian Street in Indianapolis.

Read it.

The Austin City Council voted to become a sanctuary city for transgender minors seeking “gender-affirming care” on Thursday. In a vote of 10-1, the council passed a measure that will help it undermine state law by directing police to push any enforcement of the state’s transgender child restrictions to their lowest priority.

Read it.

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas activist-scholar at Columbia University. Abdou teaches virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual twaddle concocted by modern man. Nearly every student loan taken in the U.S. is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers.

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas “anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization” at Columbia University. Now, I don’t mean to pick on Abdou. It’s just that he happens to teach virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual identitarian twaddle concocted by modern man.

Ultimately, we make Abdou’s job possible. Nearly every student loan taken in the U.S. is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, since it allows every student a chance at higher education. The reality, however, is that we have incentivized universities to create hordes of debt-ridden, credentialed nitwits.

Read it.

For some reason, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle decided to interview actor Robert De Niro on the Thursday edition of The 11th Hour. On multiple occasions, De Niro would compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and himself and his compatriots to Jews in Nazi Germany, claiming “it’s [bleep] scary.”

Ruhle wondered, “What do you say to those who say, ‘I don’t like the guy, but I’m going to vote for him.’ What’s your message to them?” De Niro claimed that “I don’t understand it. I don’t think they understand how dangerous it will be if he ever, God forbid, becomes president.”

Read it.

Four West Virginia middle school students who said they were punished after protesting against transgender athletes last month were granted a temporary injunction and will be able to protest at future meets without fear of reprisal, WDTV said.

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A group of conservative leaders is calling on the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, to resign from her leadership position following an explosive report from The Daily Signal.

“The American people have lost trust in your ability to lead the Civil Rights Division,” reads a letter to Clarke, signed by Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller, American Accountability Foundation President Tom Jones, Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins, and CatholicVote President Brian Burch. “We request that you resign immediately.”

The Daily Signal published a report on Tuesday highlighting evidence that Clarke had not disclosed a 2006 arrest and subsequent expungement during her 2021 nomination to the DOJ—and then explicitly denied ever having been arrested to Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton.

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The prosecution’s sixth witness was Keith Davidson, former attorney for Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels. Davidson played an important role in the $130,000 payment to Daniels at the heart of the prosecution’s case.

NEW YORK—Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case suffered more setbacks Thursday as the prosecution’s sixth witness wrapped up his testimony with significant hits to his credibility.

During a heated cross-examination, defense attorney Emil Bove managed to cast Keith Davidson, former attorney for Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, as a shady lawyer who gets as close to the line as he can without crossing it, brokering deals that border on extortion.

Read it.

The Biden administration announced a new rule on Friday that allows Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to apply for health care under the Affordable Care Act. The program was established under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2012.

Illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children will be eligible later this year for federal health care coverage under the Biden administration.

The White House announced a new rule Friday that allows Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to apply for health care under the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare.

Newsweek.

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is a classic example of intrusive big-government overreach. It places a new compliance burden on main street Americans with an LLC, and failure to comply comes with criminal penalties that could land you behind bars.

The CTA requires individuals with “substantial control” over a company or an equity position of 25 percent or greater to disclose personal data with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) – a government bureau most Americans have never heard of before.

The CTA will impact small businesses across the nation in addition to millions of citizens who use LLCs to invest in real estate or to protect their assets. Over 32 million business entities are estimated to be affected by the law.

Americans with a CTA filing obligation must report their name, date of birth, address, and a scan of their government-issued photo ID to the Treasury Department. Any time this information changes, updated information must be submitted to FinCEN’s database within thirty days.

Thoughts From the Ammo Line.

Let us assume for the moment that a woman who has 20 years of experience as an executive secretary, types 100 wpm, can take shorthand like a tape recorder, and is smart as a whip, discreet, well-groomed, and pleasant to all is also a few pounds north of what is an acceptable weight for a woman according to Hollywood — 90 lbs. with impossibly large breasts. She gets raises every year and is considered indispensable by her executive boss.

Let us say further, sadly, that boss has a heart attack one day and dies. A new executive is chosen who has his own ideas about what the “face” of the corporation should be. He wants a sleek, young secretary who is a Size 2. The old secretary is let go and she files a suit for size discrimination, since it was unfortunately mentioned in an ill-advised email that that was the real reason. Uh oh. You can fire someone for NO reason, but not for a WRONG reason!

Now I am no attorney and don’t even play one on TV. However, I would be inclined to side with the excellent but slightly zaftig secretary. Wouldn’t you? She is doing a great job but has been thrown out in the street simply for being too large. Let us pretend that she wins her lawsuit and retires to Samoa where her nickname from now on will be “Slim.”

But…follow me around one more bend. Another secretary in the firm, not nearly as skilled, not nearly as efficient or even pleasant, is of “normal” weight as determined by the thoroughly discredited “BMI” calculations. She has had a couple of warnings about tardiness and ineptitude and sees the handwriting on the wall. So, she deliberately GAINS 70 lbs. in order to have a literal and figurative cushion of immunity against losing her job. “You can’t fire me,” she gloats, “I’m FAT!” Adding, “But you better not use that word, because that is fat-shaming and that is actionable. Neener, neener.”

Read it.

The following video from France uses the culture-enriching stabbing death of a young man named Matisse as the jumping-off point for a list of other victims, identified by name, who have met their demise at the hands of immigrants and their descendants.

The listed names represent only a tiny fraction of native French people who have been killed by culture-enrichers. Mainstream media outlets do their best avoid reporting on murders committed by migrants, but those who read French can discover many of the incidents by monitoring local news outlets, which are more open in their reporting of such matters. (The same is true here in the USA, where news of the most horrific immigrant violence may be found on the websites of local TV stations.)

Power Line.

Many Americans have been shocked at the spectacle of thousands of college students, along with thousands more non-college students, engaging in kill-the-Jews riots. These people are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, which means in favor of gang rape and mass murder. How could this possibly have happened?

I have seen suggestions that left-wing professors have led students astray, and no doubt that is true. We have seen many professors participating in these pro-mass murder rallies. But I think that explanation misses a more fundamental point: hating Israel and, more important, hating the United States, has been built into the curriculum of many, perhaps most, public K-12 schools.

al Qaeda’s ideology focused hatred on two countries: America, the Great Satan, and Israel, the Little Satan. al Qaeda’s philosophy has now been adopted by American liberals and is being taught in our public schools. Liberals tell children that the great evil of world history is “settler colonialism.” But it turns out that, despite millennia of peoples migrating and invading, there are actually only two instances of “settler colonialism”–the United States and Israel. The Great Satan and the Little Satan. This is the nonsense with which our children’s minds are being poisoned, long before they go to college.

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Outside the mob of Hamas supporters were chanting “Genocide Joe” while inside Joe Biden was trying to raise more money.

Yet the terrorist supporters and the president both shared a funding source.

The Soros clan has been accused of providing an estimated $15 million to the pro-terrorist groups storming cities in support of Hamas, and an estimated $758,000 already to Biden.

Read it.

Roughly 100,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children are expected to enroll in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance next year under a new directive the Biden administration released Friday.

The Foundry.

College campuses this week escalated efforts to root out pro-Hamas, anti-Israel occupations, with police making arrests on nine different campuses.

Police have made more than 1,600 arrests in connection with the disruptive, illegal campus occupations since the first one began April 19 at Columbia University, according to an investigation by The Washington Stand. [The Associated Press on Thursday put the number of related arrests at over 2,000.}

Disturbingly, some universities are beginning to cave to protesters’ demands to restore order, even as campus protests become increasingly dominated by people who aren’t students.

Although I challenge anyone to tell the difference: They dress the same, they talk the same, they think the same, and they behave the same. They are all equally ignorant.

Read it.

A top scientist said in newly disclosed testimony that a lab origin for the virus that causes COVID-19 is possible, citing how Chinese scientists operated in less-than-ideal conditions.

“You can’t rule that out,” Ralph [‘humanized mice for testing bat Covid’] Baric, a University of North Carolina professor and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, said in the testimony.

Mr. Baric pointed to how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located near where the first cases of COVID-19 were detected, conducted experiments on viruses under biosafety level two conditions, rather than the biosafety level three conditions typically employed elsewhere.

The Foundry.

A White House official told the Agriculture Department to include left-leaning groups, including the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the League of United Latin American Citizens, among “stakeholders” to help implement President Joe Biden’s executive order aimed at turning out the vote.

At the same time, records obtained by The Daily Signal show that USDA brass had extensive discussions with the Raben Group, a Democrat-aligned lobbying group managed by former officials of the Clinton and Obama administration.

The Raben Group represented the left-wing advocacy group Demos, which has pushed the so-called Green New Deal and labor unions’ policy goals. As The Daily Signal previously reported, Demos worked with the USDA on “best practices” to boost voting.

Matt Taibbi.

Last week, in “It’s Not Me, It’s You,’” I wrote about a booming new op-ed genre, the editorial that bashes hick voters for their incorrect “Perception of the Economy.” Pundits attack voters’ “stubbornly low” assessments, producing poll numbers that leave experts “baffled” and wondering when people will catch up to “reality.”

Read it.

Terry Clark Hughes Jr. already had a long rap sheet in North Carolina well before he killed four police officers this past week in Charlotte. With multiple warrants spanning several years as well as being involved in a high speed chase in January of 2024, Hughes should have been buried in the prison system for a very long time. Sadly, this was not the case – North Carolina is a blue state and Charlotte is a Democrat run city notorious for its soft treatment of repeat criminals.