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We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews (n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey (N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

The American Mind.

In all the hysteria about the threat to democracy connected to the bombast of Donald Trump, an arguably greater long-term threat is mounting, though all but ignored, from the well-funded green movement. Increasingly, as Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman write in their new book, Children of a Modest Star, the much ballyhooed threat of climate change means that power needs to be stripped from nation-states and transferred to “planetary governance” informed by “planetary sapience,” which would then decree how humans use and generate energy.

Such proposals reflect not just extremism as exemplified by the leftist green parties but have support in the corporate establishment in both Europe and North America. Post-national governance has been an intrinsic aspect of corporate liberalism since at least the Club of Rome?report, issued in 1972, financed by Italy’s oligarchic Agnelli family. That report pioneered the agenda of central control, austerity, and retrenchment necessary to stave off what was seen as inevitable population-driven mass starvation and social chaos.

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The new Conservative New Zealand Coalition Government has cancelled a climate flatulence tax which was due to start in 2025.

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But two of them – the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus – stand out for the unparalleled fundraising they do through independent but closely aligned nonprofit arms. Filled with current members of Congress and representatives from some of America’s largest corporations, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute operate outside of normal campaign finance laws to raise millions of dollars each year.

Needless to say, these are composed entirely of Democrats. Black Republicans have tried to join the Congressional Black Caucus in the past and been rejected.

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The price tag for a ‘first-class’ high-rise for the homeless and drug addicts in the utopian progressive hellhole neighborhood of Skid Row, located in downtown Los Angeles, has topped nearly $600k per unit. The building comprises 228 studios and 50 one-bedroom apartments, with the total project costing taxpayers $165 million. This project was financed by state housing funds and $56 million in state tax credits.

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The Israel-Hezbollah war continues spreading and expanding along the border region, as on Wednesday the Shia paramilitary group backed by Iran fired some 160 missiles into Israel after the IDF killed a top Hezbollah commander, Taleb Sami Abdullah, in south Lebanon the day prior.

According to details from a regional war correspondent, Hezbollah “fired missiles and rockets at two Israeli military bases in retaliation for the Israeli strike on a house about six miles from Israel’s northern border, inside Lebanon, that killed Abdullah, 55, and three other Hezbollah officials who were meeting there.”

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Republican House lawmakers joined Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) on Wednesday in releasing the 32nd annual edition of the “Congressional Pig Book,” a compilation of “pork-barrel” projects in the federal budget.

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Turns out trying to extort the person paying your salary isn’t the best way to go about making sure a business is successful.

Take Philadelphia, for instance, where a chain of three OCF Coffee Houses are closing down “immediately” after its workers informed the owner of their intent to unionize.

Instead, now, none of them have jobs.

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In a shocking announcement, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) blocked a challenge from transgender swimmer Lia Thomas making it so that Thomas cannot compete in the women’s category in the Olympics or any other elite swimming competition.

They must not have gotten the memo.

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A coalition of immigrant advocacy groups sued the Biden administration on Wednesday over President Joe Biden’s recent directive that effectively halts asylum claims at the southern border, saying it differs little from a similar move during the Trump administration that was blocked by the courts.

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Rates of illegal entries into the United States have spiked in recent years, and in cities across the country, federal law enforcement are encountering thousands of undocumented migrants every month. With the 2024 presidential election only months away, and immigration as a leading issue for millions of voters, the Biden administration has adopted a hard-line approach to border security. Exactly how effective the new policy will be — both politically, and at its stated goal of reducing the flow of illegal migrants — remains to be seen.

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If, of course, that’s what you wan to do.

Guaranteed to make you vote Democrat.

(I’m waiting for the Blackened SPAM Burrito.)

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Board members of CAIR are, of course, perfectly safe.

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An investigation by The Economist found The New York Times bestseller list is biased against books from conservative publishers, saying they are “7 percentage points less likely” to make the list than books from publishers with similar sales figures.

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

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As they do.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees American-funded news outlets across the globe, attempted to stonewall a congressional investigation into corruption at the agency and privately pleaded with a lawmaker to end the probe as investigators began to uncover widespread misconduct at the organization’s highest levels, according to a report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), determined that senior USAGM employees spent years trying to shield agency executive Setareh Sieg from discipline over allegations she “used taxpayer funds for personal travel, falsified her educational credentials to obtain high-level employment, and engaged in a pattern of favoritism that materially benefitted some employees at the expense of the public.”

The report on the committee’s investigation, released Tuesday and reviewed in advance by the Free Beacon, shows that the allegations against Sieg, the onetime director of Voice of America’s Persian News Network, “have merit and are supported by substantial evidence.” The conclusion was reached even as USAGM officials tried to protect Sieg from scrutiny and pleaded with McCaul’s team to drop the years-long probe.

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Julian Wood and Bionca Ellis.

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‘Suicide drone’? Was it self-aware and guided by AI?

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A U.S. appeals court on June 9 upheld a ban preventing a Massachusetts middle school student from wearing a shirt reading “There are only two genders.”

Another prohibition by school administrators, this time blocking the same student from wearing the shirt with “only two” covered by tape, on which was written “censored,” is also allowed under court precedent, according to the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Time to leave.

“The question here is not whether the t-shirts should have been barred. The question is who should decide whether to bar them—educators or federal judges. Based on Tinker, the cases applying it, and the specific record here, we cannot say that in this instance the Constitution assigns the sensitive (and potentially consequential) judgment about what would make ‘an environment conducive to learning’ at NMS to us rather than to the educators closest to the scene,” U.S. Circuit Judge David Barron wrote for a unanimous panel of the court.

The question is not whether to have censorship – that is obviously yes – but who is to do the censoring. Time to leave.

“[The school] permissibly concluded that the shirt invades the rights of others,” Judge Talwani said before quoting Tinker. “Schools can prohibit speech that is in ‘collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone.’”

Orwell, you were SO right….

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Tyler Cowan, an economist at George Mason University in D.C.

The right-wing tendencies are easiest to explain. South Africa is obviously much wealthier than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and of course Westerners play a larger role in its history and also in its present. You can put different glosses on that, but a variety of those paths lead to right-wing conclusions. The left-wing lessons are more novel to ponder, here are a few.

Cowan is generally libertarian, and when dealing with libertarians, labels such as ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ really say more about which Modern Political Tribe one belongs to than it does to the labelee. Generally libertarians tend to be realistic about Noticing, so he’s got that going for him.

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The student, identified in a Washington Free Beacon report as Harvard Law Review editor Ibrahim Bharmal, has landed an immigration law clerkship with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, according to a LinkedIn post. Bharmal and divinity school graduate student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo were each charged with two misdemeanors on May 19 stemming from their conduct at an Oct. 18 “die-in” protest held outside Harvard Business School. Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were captured on camera accosting a first-year Israeli business school student, surrounding the student and making it difficult for him to walk freely, as keffiyeh-clad onlookers shouted, “SHAME!”

Bharmal was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and with violations of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act, which prohibits attempts to “intimidate or interfere with … any other person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him [or her] by the constitution.” Bharmal is expected back in court in September for his arraignment and faces up to 100 days in jail for each count, court filings reviewed by the Free Beacon show

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The daughter of Palestine Chronicle editor in chief Ramzy Baroud works for American Muslims for Palestine, a leading anti-Israel group that has defended Hamas terrorism and spearheaded anti-Semitic campus protests—activism that prompted Israeli terror victims to sue the group for providing “substantial assistance to Hamas.”

The Palestine Chronicle, a little-known nonprofit based in Washington state, was thrust into the spotlight this week after Israel revealed that one of its writers, Abdallah Aljamal, held hostages on Hamas’s behalf. Its editor in chief, Baroud, is a U.S.-based writer who defended Hamas in the wake of Oct. 7 and worked for the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera outlet. He also has bylines on two Iranian regime-controlled websites that the U.S. government says were run by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Washington Free Beacon first reported Monday.

Watch it.

This gives me hope for America.

The American Mind.

The gentle haze of default social progressivism continues wafting unbroken in the background of most big-ticket pop art. For every Chris Pratt sermon at the MTV awards, ten more nature documentaries about gay flamingoes are greenlit. There are various reasons why the silent majority continues to sit and take this in its charmingly but unproductively silent way.

 

New York Post.

“Remember the Boston marathon [bombing]? I’m afraid something like that might happen again or worse,” one of the sources told The Post.

The target who was subject to the wiretap was previously released by federal authorities at the southern border with a court date next year, but it has since emerged he has potential ties to ISIS, sources said.

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The granddaughter of Hillary Clinton’s mentor was arrested on felony burglary charges after she occupied a Stanford University building during anti-Israel protests last week.

Zoe Edelman, a rising senior and a managing editor of the Stanford Daily, was one of 13 students who barricaded themselves inside the Stanford president’s office while demanding that the school divest from Israel, according to arrest records.

Edelman is the granddaughter of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, whom Hillary Clinton has called “my hero and mentor.” Clinton interned with Marian Wright Edelman while studying at Yale Law School, and she later served on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund.

The turd doesn’t fall far from the anus.

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Rap artist Jay-Z drew outrage from left-wing critics over the weekend when his talent agency unveiled an initiative to promote a school-choice program that would give Philadelphia’s low-income students access to the city’s prestigious private schools.

Roc Nation, the talent agency Jay-Z founded, will host events to educate residents about proposed legislation in the Pennsylvania Senate that would distribute from public funds up to $300 million in scholarships to low-income students. The legislation is similar to school-choice voucher programs across the country that give students the opportunity to pursue education at private schools rather than low-performing public schools.

“We want to empower the youth and families with the knowledge to pursue their scholastic dreams, make their voices heard, and become the leaders of tomorrow,” Roc Nation’s managing director of philanthropy Dania Diaz said of the initiative. Left-wing opponents of school-choice policies, however, described Jay-Z’s education initiative as a betrayal and a sinister collaboration with right-wing forces.

“This is no different than the right-wing efforts in Arizona, Florida and elsewhere just because they put a Black face on it,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project series.

“All within the stete, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

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“The Virginia NAACP is bringing this lawsuit on behalf of its members and families, including students in the Shenandoah County school system,” the NAACP’s press release announcing the lawsuit reads. “The families whose children attend Shenandoah County Public Schools seek the removal of Confederate names and mascots and to prevent any future naming involving Confederate leaders. The Virginia NAACP will not allow localities to advance white supremacy. The Virginia NAACP will continue to fight against policies and legislation that serve to send the Commonwealth of Virginia backward.”

The lawsuit comes after the school board voted to reverse a 2020 decision to change the schools’ names because they were linked to Confederate leaders. On May 10, the Shenandoah board voted 5-1 to reinstate the original names, with Mountain View High School going back to the name Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary School returning to the name Ashby-Lee Elementary School.

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They made a mess of the area, desecrated monuments to heroes of the American Revolution, burned American flags, harassed officers of the law—the very few who even arrived to do anything at all—and despite many wearing face masks, revealed the true face of their movement.

I don’t say “pro-Hamas” lightly here. Many were wearing Hamas headbands.

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The White House took the unprecedented step of intervening in an international labor dispute last year after a push from powerful U.S. labor unions. Then, months later, a multi-nation tribunal threw the case out, handing a defeat to the administration and its labor allies.

Last year, the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers—which collectively represent more than 13 million American workers and regularly funnel millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission data—made their formal appeal to the White House’s Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), according to legal filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

In the appeal, the unions called on the administration to invoke a little-known clause in the 2020 North American trade agreement in support of Los Mineros, a Mexican miners’ union locked in a years-long labor dispute with the massive San Martin mine in Zacatecas, Mexico. The White House, which regularly claims to be the most pro-union White House in U.S. history, soon obliged and assembled a panel to review the case.

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Patagonia, the U.S.-based outdoor clothing retailer, funneled tens of thousands of dollars to a progressive organization linked to Palestinian terror groups, according to the Washington Examiner.

Read it.

Time to leave.

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The conservationist group known as NYC Audubon changed its name to NYC Bird Alliance to distance itself from the pro-slavery views of ornithologist and illustrator John James Audubon, the organization announced.

Washington Poop.

The draft rules, arriving less than five months before Election Day, are part of President Biden’s argument that he is addressing pocketbook problems.

Yeah, by picking the pocket of people who loan money to make things easier for deadbeat Democrats (but I repeat myself). No wonder the economy is in the toilet, with the government changing the rules every time you turn around.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

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In the midst of the infamous “Pride Month,” with rainbow flags seemingly in every store window and on every company logo, we got an inside look at how two federal agencies celebrate Pride Month—especially their inclusion of the criminals they supervise by providing them resource guides for LGBTQ-friendly housing, employment, mental health groups, and more.

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U.S. taxpayers will likely be footing the bill for the majority of first lady Jill Biden’s cross-Atlantic travel where she traveled from France to the United States then back to France in less than 48 hours.

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One down, three to go.

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The latest fiasco involves a RICO case against one rapper named Young Thug and co-defendants, in which Mr. Thug (Jeffrey Lamar Williams) and pals have been charged with several gang-related crimes related to the “Young Slime Life” group.

During a Monday court hearing, Mr. Thug’s attorney, Brian Steel, was arrested after alleging that the judge, Ural Glanville, arranged a “secret” meeting with a key witness, Kenneth Copeland (a no-no).

Judge Glanville gave Steel until 5pm to disclose his source regarding the secret meeting, arguing that Steel wasn’t supposed to have any communication with a state witness sworn to testify.

Steel, facing a contempt charge, refused to reveal his source citing attorney-client privilege – after which he can be seen being taken into custody.

PBS.

Gates was in the tiny community of Kemmerer Monday to break ground on the project. The co-founder of Microsoft is chairman of TerraPower. The company applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March for a construction permit for an advanced nuclear reactor that uses sodium, not water, for cooling. If approved, it would operate as a commercial nuclear power plant.

The site is adjacent to PacifiCorp’s Naughton Power Plant, which will stop burning coal in 2026 and natural gas a decade later, the utility said. Nuclear reactors operate without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases. PacifiCorp plans to get carbon-free power from the reactor and says it is weighing how much nuclear to include in its long-range planning.

Why Wyoming? Well, Wyoming is in the Middle of Nowhere, so there are no close urban areas full of activist robot Democrat mobs to cause trouble–like this one:

Edwin Lyman co-authored an article in Science on Thursday that raises concerns that this fuel could be used for nuclear weapons. Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the risk posed by HALEU today is small because there isn’t that much of it around the world. But that will change if advanced reactor projects, which require much larger quantities, move forward, he added. Lyman said he wants to raise awareness of the danger in the hope that the international community will strengthen security around the fuel.

Let’s hear it for the effectiveness of the ‘international community’ which can’t even keep Russia from invading Ukraine (both of which have nuclear power plants), or Iran from buying enriched uranium from Niger for its bomb-the-Jews-until-they-glow-in-the-dark project. Yeah, I’m holding my breath.

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Won’t that be fun?

ZMan sounds the alarm.

One of the defining features of this age is the collapse in respect for the spirit of the laws through the reinterpretation of the letter of the law. In every aspect of life, clever schemers are either crafting documents that conceal their intent or they are reinterpreting commonly understood words and phrases so they can claim some new intent behind the words. This is driven not just by a disrespect for the intent behind the words, but a disregard for the very idea of rules.

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Yesterday’s right-wing conspiracy theories are today’s conventional wisdom. That’s long been true, but recent events provide a plethora of examples.

Rod Dreher.

On Monday, Americans and Britons woke up to media reports about the surge of the “far right” in Europe. The news, according to Anglophone media, was especially bad in France, where the “far right” walloped President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition so thoroughly that Macron felt compelled to call snap elections.

English speakers could be forgiven for panicking over fear that a Franco-fascist skunk called Pepe Le Pétain had come to stink up the Republic, and herald the odiferous return of Vichy. After all, what else could “far right” mean?

After this weekend’s vote, it should be clear that “far right” is a term that says more about the biases of the person using it than it does about the person or party to whom it is applied.

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The ‘Healthy Masculinity Club’ at a Portland high school is described as a “place for guys to not be guys” while the ‘Healthy Masculinity’ class at Montpelier High School in Vermont indoctrinates boys on “how traditional concepts of masculinity have harmed women.”

The ‘Healthy Masculinity’ movement is a component of DEI, but it has attracted less attention and controversy than other ‘woke’ indoctrination programs that target ‘whiteness’ and teach racism or promote pornographic sexual identity programming. Nevertheless it may be even more destructive than all of the other high school DEI programs put together.

Much like ‘whiteness’ courses, the premise of ‘Healthy Masculinity’ is that there is something wrong with being a man. A Call to Men, for example, defines masculinity as a ‘Man Box’ in which men are “expected to be strong, successful, powerful, dominating, fearless, in control, and emotionless” that men have to “break out of” to end their ‘toxic masculinity’.

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The University of California, Los Angeles, medical school has gone to extraordinary lengths for over five years to shield its admissions practices from internal scrutiny, stonewalling data requests from concerned professors and refusing to assure admissions officials that they would not face retaliation for cooperating with an internal probe of the school’s admissions office, according to three sources with firsthand knowledge of the situation and documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Since at least 2018, the school has refused to provide members of its faculty oversight board data on the relationship between admitted students’ academic credentials and their performance in medical school, two former members of that board said.

It has also slow-walked, since November of last year, its response to a public records request for similar data, pushing back the estimated date of availability four times over the course of six months, according to emails from UCLA’s public records office.

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If you don’t get on board with woke, you oppose “democracy.” You’re a bigot, a racist, or a Christian nationalist.

Where does this insane idea come from? It comes from the spin masters at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a map with Ku Klux Klan chapters. It updates this “hate map” annually with a “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for the previous year. On Tuesday, it published the report for 2023.