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As North Carolina’s public university system considers a vote on changing its diversity policy, the system’s flagship university board voted Monday to cut funding for diversity programs in next year’s budget.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved a change that would divert $2.3 million of diversity spending from state funds to go toward public safety and policing at a special meeting to address the university’s budget. The board’s vote would only impact UNC-Chapel Hill’s diversity funding, which could result in the loss of its diversity office.

UNC will join the ranks of other notable public universities that have stripped diversity spending, such as the University of Florida in Gainesville, which announced in a March memo it was reallocating funds to faculty recruitment. But unlike UF, which implemented its funding rollback after the state Legislature passed a bill banning diversity program spending at state universities, UNC “set the tone” on funding cuts before the North Carolina Legislature stepped in, budget chair Dave Boliek said.

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Chinese students pursuing an education at western universities are faced with intimidation by Chinese authorities and their proxies—fellow Chinese students.

This is the conclusion of an Amnesty International report that draws on dozens of testimonials from students in Europe as well as the U.S.

While students feel quietly intimidated by their more ‘patriotic’ peers, such tactics can be also applied to their family members.

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The Liberal Democrats, sometimes viewed as Britain’s third largest political party, have tolerated a “hostile environment” for Christians and deselected a parliamentary candidate because of his Christian faith, in breach of equality law, some of its members have claimed.

David Campanale, who is an award-winning former BBC journalist and, crucially, an Anglican, is set to be replaced as a prospective MP candidate for Sutton and Cheam after what The Daily Telegraph described as “a two-year campaign against him by members of his local party and a number of LGBT activists.”

Human rights campaigner Benedict Rogers said the action against Campanale amounted to “persecution.” It is reminiscent of Tim Farron’s time as leader of the Lib Dems, which came to an end in 2017 after just two years when he concluded that “remaining faithful to Christ” was incompatible with leading the party.

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Whose side will Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson be on if protesters become lawbreakers at the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and how will he direct police to respond?

Concerns that Johnson will side with lawbreakers already are common, and Johnson’s interview published Sunday by the Chicago Tribune should increase those concerns.

The American Mind.

I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today for sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” – Senator Joe Biden, 1975

Major political and social phenomena do not spring up fully armored and ready for battle, like Athena from Zeus’s head. They have powerful motivations that drive them and gestate for years before they can come into being—they also have powerful interests that they serve. I believe that many of the fundamental trends in anti-white politics and rhetoric serve a common ideological purpose. That purpose is to create an intellectual and cultural environment to justify the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites while instituting a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.

While this statement may seem alarmist, in fact, this expropriation is already ongoing. In many cases, it is still on the margins of our popular politics, but like so many other leftist political movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what was marginal will soon become mainstream.

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Looking at what the kids are up to these days–I’m good with that.

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The NATO country with the second largest military in the alliance has just admitted to aiding and abetting a US-designated terror organization.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in surprisingly frank statements acknowledged that Turkey is currently treating over 1,000 Hamas members in various hospitals across the country. In the remarks he stressed that Turkey does not consider them terrorists, but as part of a “resistance movement” against Israel.

Turkey doesn’t belong in NATO now that communism is dead in Russia.

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As Stacy McCain likes to say, crazy people are dangerous.

Axios.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki claims in her new book that President Biden never looked at his watch during the ceremony for soldiers killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — contradicting news photos and firsthand accounts of Gold Star families.

Who are you going to believe, Jen or your lyin’ eyes?

New York Magazine.

Jamaal Bowman, the two-term congressman from Westchester County and the would-be future of the progressive left, is tired of the questions about George Latimer. “Yeah, I mean, I think it says something about his character, his integrity, and his actual leadership for the district. But enough of him. When are we going to talk about me?”

“You’d  be surprised by what you don’t need.” — Rollo Tomassi.

David Freer.

Some bloke posted on X that the ambitions and hobbies of all men are chosen to improve their chances of finding a mate. Now, I am sure this is true for him, and like so many people he does assume all others at least of his sex are absolutely identical to him. His theory, for what it is worth, was that desire to reproduce is primal and dominates all other things. Tell that to a man who is cold and wet to the point of hypothermia, or hungry, or even thirsty. Deal with the actual survival primaries, and yes, once you’re warm and comfortable enough, if you don’t breed you can think of it, long-term, as evolution in action.

David Freer is one of my Recommended Writers. (See sidebar on the right.)

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If you had to identify a specific type of real estate that has seen its value increase because of changing consumer eating habits, global demographic shifts, worldwide pandemic preparedness, and US export policy — while its importance to reducing global carbon emissions and adapting to climate change rise in tandem — refrigerated warehouses may not be your first pick.

But there’s a strong case to be made that the expansion and evolution of the cold-storage industry — often called the “cold chain” — will play a significant role in energy, environmental, and economic news in the 21st century. Cold storage facilities aren’t fun places to visit; some are kept so frigid, at minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, that the workers who toil in these windowless spaces rotate in 15-minute shifts, despite their heavy protective gear.

Power Line.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a possible VP choice, continues to take heat for gunning down a vicious canine. That invites a look at Vice President Biden’s response to a mass shooting of American soldiers by U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan, who billed himself as a “soldier of Allah.”

On November 5, 2009 at Fort Hood, Maj. Hasan yelled “Allahu akbar” and blasted away with two handguns. He shot dead Capt. John P. Gaffney, Spc. Frederick Greene, civilian physician assistant Michael Cahill, Maj. Eduardo Caraveo, Staff Sgt. Justin Michael DeCrow and Spc. Jason Dean Hunt, who took a fatal bullet in the back. Hasan killed Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, Pfc Michael S. Pearson, Capt. Gilbert Russell Seager, and Pfc. Kham See Xiong, 23, of St. Paul, Minnesota. The terrorist’s victims included three women.

Pfc. Francheska Velez, 21, was pregnant and yelled “My baby! My baby!” Hasan shot her in the chest, and her pre-born child was never counted among the murder victims. The soldier of Allah also shot dead Lt. Col. Juanita L. Warman, 55, and Staff Sgt. Amy Sue Krueger, 29, who took a fatal bullet in the chest.

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The Arizona grand jury that recently indicted 18 people for allegedly trying to help former President Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election with so-called ‘fake electors’ went completely rogue and took ‘aggressive steps to haul in witnesses,’ to the point where they ‘even brought charges against some’ who were told by prosecutors that they weren’t under investigation, Politico reports.

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The U.K.’s cumulative net migration in the 25 years up to 1997 was just 68,000. In the 25 years to follow, cumulative net migration was at least 5.8 million,” a damning new report co-authored by Britain’s former immigration minister Robert Jenrick finds, exposing the myths perpetuated by the Western liberal mainstream.

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A new analysis suggests that school-based mindfulness programs, widely implemented in recent years, do not significantly benefit adolescents’ mental health or well-being.

Imagine that.

Power Line.

The Babylon Bee—”America’s newspaper of record,” as Glenn Reynolds likes to put it—has established itself as a premier humor and political satire site of our time. They’ve pretty much put The Onion out of business, though one reason for this is The Onion slowly succumbed to wokery, and hence has trouble in the humor department. (Check it out if you want; it’s pretty weak these days.)

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Biden’s tax proposals would effectively increase the top federal marginal tax rate on long-term capital gains to 44.6%, a record high since the tax was enacted in the 1920s. As a result, taxes paid on long-term capital gains would reach levels above 50% in some states after accounting for state capital gains taxes. Biden also proposed increasing the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% and presented a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains for individuals whose net worth exceeds $100 million.

These proposals present two problems. First, they showcase a disregard for the personal property, earnings, and lives of the individuals and organizations subject to the taxes. Second, these taxes would have dire consequences for economic growth and, thus, would negatively impact the living standards of everyday Americans.

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attacks and shunning have been unrelenting. The media has played a role in that culture and none more prominently than the New York Times. Recently, however, the mob came for liberal professors and media who have remained silent for years as conservatives and others were targeted on campus.

Suddenly, there is a new interest in free speech and academic freedom, including by the Times editors who blamed cancel culture for the recent demonstrations and disruptions on campus.

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Chloe Veltman, a correspondent on National Public Radio’s “Culture Desk” who last year celebrated the “Nation’s first ‘drag laureate,'” is still guarding the far-left ramparts of U.S. culture for NPR with Saturday’s “The Met Gala has fueled backlash against stars who are silent about the Gaza conflict.”

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When happens when your city pisses away all of your tax revenue on trying to feed, shelter and coddle activists and homeless people? You wind up having to make budget cuts. And, in Seattle, those cuts could be coming in the form of closing up to 20 elementary schools.

The district’s budget deficit has reached more than $100 million, according to new reporting from MYNorthwest.

And Superintendent Brent Jones’ proposal for ‘Well-Resourced Schools’ might lead to the shutdown of over a quarter of the district’s 73 elementary schools, the report says.

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The 66-year-old star of “Fargo” and “Boardwalk Empire” was assaulted late Wednesday morning in Manhattan and taken to a nearby hospital with bruising, swelling, and bleeding of his left eye.

“Steve Buscemi was assaulted in Mid-Town Manhattan, another victim of a random act of violence in the city,” according to a statement Sunday from his publicist. “He is ok and appreciates everyone’s well wishes.”

‘Random act of violence’ about sums up Blue State life.

UPDATE: Actor Steve Buscemi Assaulted in New York. Here’s How the Big Apple Became Sucker Punch City.

The Atlantic.

Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”

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1 in 10 college students answered that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had created the New Deal. And only 1 in 10 knew James Madison’s role in shaping the Constitution.

That survey from the ‘American Council of Trustees and Alumni’ was one of several warnings about the catastrophic illiteracy of college students and graduates.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute did its own survey of over 28,000 undergraduates from 80 colleges and the average score on the civic literacy exam was an F. At top schools, including Yale, seniors actually knew less than freshmen. A Collegiate Learning Assessment found that after two years almost half of students showed “no significant gains in learning”.

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CBS reporter Robert Costa put together a puffball interview for HBO Real Time host Bill Maher on their show Sunday Morning. They let him claim he’s not ideological and didn’t laugh when he said “I speak for the normies. I speak for that vast middle that is tired of the partisanship. I don’t want to hate half the country, and I don’t hate half the country.” Bill Maher represents the “vast middle,” the “normies”? Conservatives across America would make a face at that. At bottom, Maher is a bit of shock jock, so that when Democrats are in power he’s going to mock them as well, just as he suggested on Friday night that the Democrats “blew it” in all their legal warfare on Trump. What was amazing in this profile was Costa imploring Maher to lay off mockery of the Left, just shine the spotlight on the right-wingers!

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A paralegal from Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg’s office testified on Friday during former President Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial that some phone call records between Michael Cohen and Stephanie Clifford’s (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) lawyer were deleted, raising questions about evidentiary integrity.

In a bid to challenge some of the evidence being put forward in President Trump’s business records falsification trial in Manhattan, Trump attorney Emil Bove asked paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider in court on May 10 about roughly three pages worth of records that the attorney claimed Mr. Bragg’s office had deleted.

Mr. Jarmel-Schneider confirmed some deletions. He acknowledged that some phone call records from 2018 between Mr. Cohen and Keith Davidson (Ms. Clifford’s lawyer) had been deleted, along with some records of conversations between Ms. Clifford’s manager Gina Rodriguez and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard about Ms. Clifford’s claim that she had an affair with President Trump.

Watch it.

Wisdom. Attend.

(Love me that pull-down shelving.)

Watch it.

Between governments and activists, our best prospect for clean energy is being strangled in its cradle.

The only country that has actually built a couple of small modular reactors is (wait for it) Red China. (My, what a surprise.)

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The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.

Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.

Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.

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According to new research, 23 percent of bachelor’s degree programs and 43 percent of master’s degree programs have a negative ROI.

The number of jobs for Grievance Studies majors is very limited.

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Eco-friendly brake cables are being eaten by foxes, after manufacturers switched from petroleum-based insulation to soy, forcing owners to wrap their cars in tarpaulins.

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Dozens of students walked out of Duke University’s commencement ceremony on Sunday as some chanted “free Palestine” to protest its guest speaker, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, for supporting Israel throughout the war in Gaza, according to videos of the event posted on social media.

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An Ohio police officer was shot and killed after being “ambushed” while answering a disturbance call over the weekend, and a suspect was being sought, authorities said Sunday.

Police in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid said officers were dispatched just before 10 p.m. Saturday to a home due to a reported disturbance.

“While police were investigating, a gunman ambushed an officer, striking him with gunfire,” police said. The officer, whose name wasn’t immediately released, was taken to a hospital but succumbed to his injuries, police said.

Euclid Ohio, as of the 2020 Census, is 30% white and 64% black.

Newsbusters.

Nine years ago this week, ABC News was roiled by a journalistic scandal: Their top political anchor had refused to disclose his big dollar contributions to the Clinton Foundation at the same time he used ABC’s airwaves in an attempt to discredit an anti-Clinton author, an obvious favor to the just-launched Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.

Yet after a few days of bad headlines, and a pair of on-air apologies, George Stephanopoulos simply resumed covering politics as if nothing had happened. ABC’s casual attitude matched the blind eye the network had turned to the anchor’s obvious bias over two decades as a pundit, correspondent and anchor.

George Stephanopoulis played the role of Michael J. Fox in the Clinton administration.

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A group of fifteen Republican Senators want the IRS to investigate whether groups involved in recent anti-Israel protests on college campuses violated their tax-exempt status by supporting Hamas, a designated terrorist group.

This ought to be a no-brainer but in these degenerate modern times it probably won’t happen.

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Scientists may have found the answer to manufacturing plastics products that actually break down without forming into microplastics, or tiny pieces of plastics that could linger for thousands of years.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and materials company Algenesis said they found a way to construct plastic with polyurethane, a “bio-based” polyurethane polymer that could compost and break down in the natural environment, compared to typical petroleum-based plastic polymers, which typically are inaccessible to biological processing, according to a study published in Scientific Reports earlier this year.

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More than most technical procedures in the ancient world, drilling of hard stone such as quartz and granite has evoked awe and puzzlement. Neither wall paintings, nor textual information, nor excavated material has provided complete answers as to how drilling was done. As a conse­quence, there has been scholarly contro­versy. One such disagreement occurred between two eminent Egyptologists, A. Lucas and Sir Flinders Petrie. Their argument revolved around a difficult and important question, namely, how did the ancient Egyptians of the 3rd millennium B.C. drill granite?

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“If you’re not with me, then you are my enemy,” proclaims the young, rebellious Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker during the emotional climax of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. To this, his disappointed master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must,” as he switches on his lightsabre. Even though the lightsabre duel that follows is universally praised as a piece of cinematic brilliance, the dialogue has left many Star Wars fans annoyed and disillusioned.

The problem is this: To claim that 1) “Only a Sith” 2) “deals in absolutes” is in itself an absolutist statement; we have here an internal contradiction. If this is really the case, then Obi-Wan has just proven himself to be a Sith. It is safe to say that this is not what George Lucas had in mind. So, theoretically, the whole philosophy of the Star Wars franchise falls flat as a result of this claim.

There is a stark parallel between the frustration that Star Wars fans express about this piece of half-baked Jedi philosophy and that of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor about the theory underpinning liberalism.

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Concerned by the increasing number of attacks on elected leaders, the German government is working on a plan to provide more protection for politicians, while ordinary citizens will be left to their own devices.

Europeans have always been more statist than Americans.

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The terms “fascist” and “fascism” are continuously bandied about today. But those who use these words most seem to understand them least, such that many of today’s self-styled anti-fascists paradoxically take on the central features of fascism to an extraordinary degree.

We can see contemporary fascist tendencies manifesting on both ends of the political spectrum — not only among white supremacists but also in the character types described by Eugene Rivers as “trust fund Becky with the good hair revolutionary communist” or “white boy Carl the anarchist from the Upper East Side who is a junior at Sarah Lawrence.”

Fascism is obviously worth opposing, but to be truly anti-fascist requires an understanding of how this ideology manifests in history and what the word actually designates. Already by the end of World War II, George Orwell noted that the term “fascist” was used so indiscriminately that it had become degraded to the level of a swearword synonymous with “bully.”

Eugene Meyer, whom I knew at Yale and who went on to help found the Federalist Society, was fond of saying that ‘fascist’ merely means ‘something I don’t like’, while ‘equitable’ merely means ‘something I like’.

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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently traveled to Springfield with a big wish list of stuff he wants from state lawmakers. Among them, $1 billion in extra funding for Chicago Public Schools.

We have a host of reasons why his demand should be categorically rejected. Among them, CPS already spends $29,000 per student, Chicago teachers are already among the nation’s highest paid in big cities and the Chicago Teachers Union refuses to close the many empty, failing schools across the district. Not to mention that both CPS and CTU refuse to hold themselves accountable to students. Just 20% of minority CPS children can read at grade level and in math it’s even worse.

Now add to that the growing rate of teachers simply not showing up to school. The U.S. Department of Education’s definition of chronic teacher absenteeism is 10 or more absences in a school year.

I think we will see, within my lifetime, public schools reduced to being the last resort of people who can’t afford private or home schooling.

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When people gripe about paying taxes and the government being a poor the absolute worst possible capital allocation, this is what they are talking about: $7.5 billion in investments for electric vehicles has – in two years – produced just 7 charging stations across four states.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by Biden in November 2021, allocated $7.5 billion for EV charging, the Washington Post writes. Of this amount, $5 billion went to states as “formula funding” for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program to establish a network of fast chargers along major highways.

Today, there’s seven chargers with a total of just 38 parking spots. And, come on: when the Post is calling it out, you know the results have been horrible.

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The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind.

And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society.

Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we only knew a fraction of it.

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One of Chevy’s longest running vehicle models has now fallen at the hands of the company’s transition to EVs. The Chevy Malibu will be no longer, according to a new report from Car and Driver.

The Chevy Malibu, one of the longest-running and most successful vehicles in history, is being discontinued again. Chevrolet informed Car and Driver that production will end in November 2024 as the automaker invests $390 million in its Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas.

Car and Driver reports that GM will also pause production of the Cadillac XT4 in January to retool for the Ultium-based Bolt EV. Production will resume in late 2025, with the XT4 and Bolt EV sharing an assembly line.

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New reporting from Forbes published last week outlines a host of college campuses employers are turning to instead of Ivy League institutions — including two in Texas.

The University of Texas at Austin and Rice University joined the rankings of new public and private school elites which are “attracting the smartest students and plaudits from employers.”

Forbes’ researchers said the evaluation came as the traditional Ivy League institutions have “faced a barrage of complaints in recent years” related to admissions policies, grade inflations at several elite schools and university officials’ responses to on-campus protests regarding the Israel-Hamas War.

For Forbes’ methodology, researchers removed the eight classic Ivy League institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell) as well as the “Ivy-plus yardstick”: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

I’d include UCLA in that latter category. However, the point of the Ivy League is that they are private institutions; UT Austin is a public school, and so wouldn’t qualify, nor is it really of the same quality as the Ivies, although Rice certainly is. If one is looking for value for money, Rice would be hard to beat.

NBC.

The woman had flooring, a computer, a desk, a printer, a Keurig and a pantry of food in the space, which was 10 to 15 feet long, five feet wide and approximately 8 feet tall at its highest point, according to the Midland Police Department.

Thank you, Joe Biden.