DC Appellate Panel Reverses Injunction, Allows Trump to Fire Special Counsel

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Well, well, well. Seems even the DC Circuit Court of Appeal has noticed that the Article III branch doesn’t have authority to tell the Article II branch who to hire or fire. 

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In a ruling handed down late yesterday, a three-judge panel unanimously vacated an injunction ordered by a circuit-court judge that ordered Donald Trump to rehire Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. Judge Amy Berman Jackson had enjoined the president from terminating Dellinger, appointed by Joe Biden a year ago, while his lawsuit challenging Trump’s authority to fire him and many other executive-branch officials remained pending. The Supreme Court declined to intervene, noting that a hearing on the merits would come soon enough to avoid any irreparable harm to Trump’s authority — at which point Dellinger began pushing back on Trump’s other efforts to reduce the federal workforce. 

The appellate court reconsidered after briefs from Trump’s attorneys and several amicus submissions:

A federal appeals court is allowing President Donald Trump to fire an official who investigates complaints from the federal workforce, lifting a lower court’s injunction that barred Trump from removing Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger.

The Justice Department argued that Dellinger’s continued work as a federal ethics watchdog was undermining Trump’s agenda. In particular, Dellinger has spearheaded a recent effort to reinstate thousands of probationary workers who were fired amid Trump’s overhaul of the federal bureaucracy.

Dellinger, an appointee of President Joe Biden, was confirmed to a five-year term last year. Trump tried to fire him Feb. 7, despite a federal law that limits the president’s ability to remove the special counsel. Until now, initial court rulings had allowed Dellinger to stay on the job.

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One has to wonder whether Dellinger’s interference with the effort to dismiss probies changed some minds at the appellate circuit. Both the appeals court and the Supreme Court left Dellinger in place on the assumption that Dellinger would refrain from taking any action that could be construed as insubordinate while the lawsuit got a hearing on the merits of whether Trump went beyond his authority. That blew up in everyone’s face, and one has to imagine that Trump had at least four votes for cert if he challenged a loss at this level.

One has to wonder whether the three-judge panel guessed the same thing. 

As Politico notes, the per curiam order doesn’t offer an explanation of their reasoning. (The order promised that an opinion would follow “in due course.”) The panel did, however, offer an expedited schedule for a hearing on the merits of the appeal. It still won’t take place soon, however. It will be more than a month before all of the motions are due for submission. Only after that is the clerk ordered to find a date for oral arguments “in this term,” which only means that a final assessment of Dellinger’s terminaton will come before July 1 — maybe sooner, but not guaranteed.

And that means that reinstatement isn’t likely to be an option. Trump will nominate a new Special Counsel to run the Office of Special Counsel (not the same kind of special counsel as Jack Smith or Robert Mueller). The Senate will have to confirm the nominee, but they can’t force Trump to appoint Dellinger again. To the extent that Dellinger is owed relief, it would be monetary in nature, not a forced return to the job — and even that seems unlikely, given the Separation of Powers Doctrine and the president’s innate authority to hire and fire political appointees, and likely everyone else in the executive branch.  

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Dellinger could appeal this decision to the Supreme Court, of course, and probably will. However, his demonstration of ‘irreparable harm’ in just a few days would likely produce a much different result there than the benefit-of-doubt treatment Dellinger got the last time. And at least four justices are now champing at the bit to make clear that federal judges don’t have the jurisdiction to make Article II personnel decisions. FAFO may not be a legal doctrine, but it does make for a compelling explanation. 

Posted in Republican News

I Have to Get This Off My Chest

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Andrew Tate is, for some reason, a divisive figure among some people on the Right. 

I don’t get it. He is, to me, self-evidently a scumbag. A degenerate sexual predator who has bragged for years about how he made his fortune by pimping out and sexually abusing women. 

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I’m not relying on hearsay to arrive at that conclusion. Tate has left a long trail of videos not only bragging about his abuse and exploitation of women. I am no prosecutor and therefore cannot point to any particular laws that he has broken, but if I were sitting on a jury after a prosecutor showed me statutes that he clearly broke, I would happily see him tossed in jail for a long time. 

Real men don’t abuse women, and if your definition of an Alpha Male is one who chokes women, treats them like dirt and brags about it, and bullies them into selling their bodies to fill his bank account, I would be happy to be called a Beta Male. I’m out if that is what the definition of a Real Man™ is. 

The Tate brothers are back in the news because they were released on bail from Romania and has returned to the United States–Florida, to be specific. And Florida doesn’t want them there. 

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has announced that a criminal investigation has been launched into Andrew and Tristan Tate, following their arriving in Florida recently after fleeing from their legal case in Romania, with him stating, “These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world — some of them minors.” 

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A chorus of Tate supporters are angry about the supposedly bad treatment of the Tates, and point to claims that Donald Trump intervened on their behalf. Trump says he knows nothing about the matter, and Tate himself says that he has never spoken to Trump. Whatever the case, it is clear that there is a wing on the Right who defend the Tate brothers and say that the legal case against them in Romania is a witch hunt. 

If you want to call it that, fine. But if that is your definition of a witch hunt, Tate is a witch. Be warned, lots of NSFW content in these videos. 

Tate took pride in teaching others how to abuse women for fun and profit, and there are plenty of videos available which I will not share in which Tate is beating women for the camera. 

Andrew Tate matters societally not because he is an abusive and likely criminal abuser of women, but because his “persecution” has become a cause célèbre for a certain wing on the Right in the same way that antisemitic conspiracies have been popping up in some of the dark corners of both the Left and the Right Tate has scored some media support from commentators like Candice Owens, who seems to admire him for his relatively compelling argument that Western Civilization has become too feminized. 

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In some instances, his diagnosis is correct, but the “solutions” that he sells to his credulous followers is to embrace the most demonic elements of masculinity. In response to the sometimes cloying “sensitive man” you find in the Gillette commercials Tate calls on men to embrace their inner rapist, as if the corrective to the excesses of one extreme view of masculinity should be corrected by becoming an ape. 

Tate, when he wants to, talks a good game and can look into the camera and deny what we have seen with our own eyes. And we have seen it with our own eyes not because some leaker who has it out for him edited videos to make him look bad, but because Tate put them out himself and bragged about how abusive he could be and still pimp women and make a fortune off their pain. 

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You could make some absurd arguments about consent, but the same could be said about street hookers and pimps. Technically they could escape at any time, but that doesn’t wash with me, and is irrelevant when talking about Tate’s character. Whether he has provably committed crimes is a matter for the courts. 

Whether you admire him is a matter for your conscience. And admiring a man like Tate and giving him respectability…I’m out. 

Andrew Tate is scum, and he should be ostracized and denounced at minimum. 

How conservatives can be divided in their opinion of Tate–how any people of good will can be, regardless of their political ideology–is a mystery to me. The fact that he repels the liberals is no reason to embrace him. They are right to be repelled. 

Defining your beliefs as the opposite of what you see in your ideological opponents is giving up your moral agency to people you dislike or disagree with. When they are right, they are right. When they are wrong, they are wrong. 

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Liberals and conservatives should be able to agree that a pimp who hits, sexually abuses, and exploits women is a bad dude. 

Posted in Republican News

Wednesday’s Final Word

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Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike — what day is it? Tab-closing DAAAAAY …

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Ed: What a great young man!

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Personally, I’m praying they keep on refusing to listen. The petulance on display last night during Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress is only going to add to the disgust many Americans are feeling. How can you not applaud a kid fighting cancer? Well, they didn’t.

And the American people aren’t likely to be thrilled, especially as the speech resonated with nearly 70 percent of the people polled about it.

Democrats are alienating their own base, alienating the middle, and keep alienating the right to the point they don’t even want to talk to the Dems.

Ed: But Trump is a NAZIFASCISTSTINKYBOTTOM, Tom Knighton? Why U no get it?

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Ed: Huh. A Vice President who actually visits the border. Who knew this was possible? HAS VANCE BEEN TO EUROPE YET? [checks notes] Oh yeah, he has. 

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Automakers will get a one-month reprieve from tariffs on Mexico and Canada for cars that comply with a free-trade agreement between those two nations and the U.S., the White House said Wednesday. …

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The tariff exemption applies not only to those Detroit-based automakers, but to any cars from Canada and Mexico that comply with the trade deal, an administration official said. 

Trump is also open to additional tariff exemptions such as those he granted to carmakers, Leavitt added. She again acknowledged that tariffs could cause some economic disruptions.

Ed: I’m not a big fan of tariffs, and I’m less a fan of tariff chaos. I do appreciate that Trump wants to force more cooperation on security and interdiction and that tariffs tend to work in forcing it. I also note well that Canada applies tariffs to American ag goods, a point that has not gone unnoticed among farmers who still worry about losing markets. I would just like a consistent and firm policy in place on which everyone can rely for minimal “disturbances,” as Trump put it last night. 

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Ed: We need more of this kind of scrutiny applied to mayors running “sanctuary cities.” Anna Paulina Luna agrees, as you will see next — and a different kind of scrutiny as well. 

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Ed: Obstruction of federal law enforcement is a crime, even when done for political purposes. If any other Tom, Dick, or Harry interfered with the IRS or ATF in a Democrat administration, you had better believe they would be prosecuted rapidly and with great enthusiasm. 

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U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner died at the age of 70, only a couple of months into his first term as a congressman.

Turner, D-Texas, suffered a medical emergency after attending President Donald Trump’s address to Congress, according to a NBC News report.

Ed: First off, may Rep. Turner rest in peace, and thank you for your brief service for your community in Congress. That’s incredibly sad news. For those who wonder, his seat will remain open until Texas governor Greg Abbott calls a special election to fill out the remainder of Turner’s term. (The US Constitution requires all House members to be elected.) It’s not yet clear when the special election will be called, but it’s safe to assume it will take a few months, during which time the seat will remain vacant. Turner’s district, TX-18, has a Cook index of D+23, so Democrats will safely hold the Houston district. 

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Ed: It sounds as though we may not see a new agreement until next week, although that’s probably as late as it will go, if that. Perhaps Zelensky’s public repentance was insufficient after all, although Trump did read part of Zelensky’s statement last night in his speech to Congress. It’s probably close to being finished.

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Moreover, the eight groups, the biggest of which are the Climate United fund and Coalition for Green Capital, which received grants of $6.9 billion and $5 billion, respectively, have been empowered by the EPA to choose the hundreds of smaller nonprofit organizations across the country that will do the climate change work. They will get loans, not grants, which they are supposed to repay. There is nothing in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that calls for oversight of those loans.

“This clearly was intended from its beginning to be a slush fund,” Glock told The Free Press. “The goal was to give them money with minimal strings and allow them to lend it to people they favored. It is an absolutely wild program. I haven’t seen the likes of in previous government-lending history.”

Ed: That’s because it was an American Adscam, intended to benefit groups that agitate for progressives in elections. And while the flow may be cut off soon, those groups received a LOT of capital, and may be able to string it out long enough to keep the scam going.  

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Ed: When will Democrats wake up to the fact that this isn’t helping? Let’s hope sometime in, oh … 2033 or so. 

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Ed: “Now it’s becoming far more common,” Raju says in the rest of the tweet while offering a link to the history of punitive measures imposed by the House. Maybe it’s because of the increased visibility of members of Congress, or the perceived benefits of grandstanding that incentivizes it. But this kind of disruptive behavior has to have some consequences if we are to curtail it at all. 

Posted in Republican News

Even NY Times’ Columnists Had Some Praise for Trump (and Criticism of Dems)

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I just came across this in the afternoon even though it was published earlier. It’s titled “‘It Was 90-Plus Minutes of Bad Moments’: 9 Opinion Writers on Trump’s Address to Congress.” Despite the headline and the graphic which suggests everyone hated Trump’s speech, he actually did get some praise from NY Times’ columnists. It’s grudging to be sure but it’s there.

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Josh Barro Trump boasted of the sharp drop in migrant encounters at the southern border and mocked President Joe Biden’s insistence that better enforcement would require new laws, declaring, “It turned out that all we really needed was a new president.” An effective line on his strongest issue.

Frank Bruni Trump is on solid political ground — and in his comfort zone — when he talks about cracking down on illegal immigration. Among many lies, he truthfully said that fewer migrants were unlawfully crossing the border: “They heard my words, and they chose not to come.” Hard to dispute that.

Michelle Cottle When Trump had the director of the Secret Service make a 13-year-old boy diagnosed with brain cancer an honorary agent. It was a heartwarming plug for the president’s Make America Healthy Again agenda — and a clever way to gloss over the problematic views of his health and human services chief…

Daniel McCarthy The State of the Union and presidential addresses to Congress like Tuesday night’s have become ritualized partisan performances, so when Trump said there was nothing he could do to get Democrats to stand, applaud or smile, he exposed the theatricality of their opposition. 

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And there’s more. Matthew Schmitz said Trump’s laundry list of DOGE cuts was funny and Farah Stockman cited several of the personal moments in the last half hour of the speech.

The article also contains a bunch of “worst moments” from these same authors. Binyamin Applebaum is the standout Trump hater who spoke the line in the headline about it being 90-minutes of bad moments. He also said the highlight was Al Green interrupting the president and shaking his cane which he labeled “civil disobedience.” As I said last night, I remember when one Republican shouting “You lie!” at the president was a major breach of decorum. What Green did was a lot worse and nothing to be proud of. He was also offended by Republicans’ “frat boy glee” but not by Democrats who glowered through a nice moment with a cancer victim and tearful thank yous from the families of a crime victims. Applebaum is clearly as much of a kook as Al Green.

Daniel McCarthy actually gave the worst moment to the Democrats and he is not wrong.

McCarthy The Democrats set themselves up to have the worst moment of the night with their jeering and heckling, especially since it reached full fury as Trump was recounting his popular-vote victory. That made it sound as though the opposition was angry at the American public.

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McCarthy continued along that theme in the final section of the piece, “Trump has become a master of drawing battle lines that put Democrats at a disadvantage, which he did here by weaving guests’ stories of suffering and injustice into his calls for border controls, stronger policing and children’s safety.” 

Exactly right. Ad Ed pointed out this morning, all Trump had to do was pick the winning side of a bunch of 80-20 issues and Democrats couldn’t help but sit on their hands to confirm they were on the other side of all of them. They made fools of themselves to the point that even the NY Times, a reliably pro-Democratic group if ever there was one, struggles to come up with anything positive to say about their behavior last night.

Posted in Republican News

And Then There Was Last Night…

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Lemme get this out of my system right off the bat: last night was a hoot – a complete, glorious, flag-waving hoot.

President Trump was in rare form, rare and precious. Relaxed, on message – notice he never once veered off into ‘SQUIRREL!’ territory as he so often does when he’s feeling his oats?

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And he was lethal on so many levels.

He skewered Democrats repeatedly for their appalling lack of manners.

…or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever. And these people – sitting right – will not clap, stand or cheer for these achievements. They won’t, no matter what. 5 times I’ve been up here.

We all know they couldn’t share in a little boy’s joy, a young man’s ecstatic surprise, or a mom’s quiet thanks for a daughter remembered.

They didn’t even have the decency to follow polite protocol and stand for the First Lady of the United States when she was introduced.

Yeah. We saw you.

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Trump skewered Democrats for simply being appalling.

And when his wingman set the hook on whacky Al Green, Trump didn’t say anything. 

This new Trump serenely watched the old man waving his cane shuffle out of the room under the direction of the Sergeant at Arms. Then he got back to his speech in a suddenly much quieter room.

Speaking of that wingman…day-yum. He’s such a keeper.

The guests Trump invited and their personal stories were immensely personal. A couple of them were just plain magical – dusty room effect – and each of them was so relatable to everyday Americans that you felt yourself cheering or simply wanting to hug them.  

How could you not get foggy-eyed at this little man? That’s the hug heard ’round the country.

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Nobody was crying.

And my heart was in my throat for precious Jocelyn Nungaray’s mom, who won’t get to hold her daughter ever again.

So many beautiful moments.

I really appreciated how he called out members of his cabinet for attaboys. That was so cool. 

Bobby Kennedy’s was another side-splitter.

There were many lighthearted moments, too, and the president displayed a deft touch with them. All you can ever say about him is, ‘Damn – he is good at this.’

There was an out-of-nowhere, absolutely hilarious segue to Greenland.

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…We’re gonna get it…One way or the other, we’re gonna get it…

That rhetorical ambush stung Greenland’s prime minister into another withering response this morning.

WAAH

The rest of us get it.

So there were 100 minutes of Trump, and while I knew it was long, it didn’t seem to drag.

Laying out a bunch of the silly crap DOGE has uncovered in that dry Trump delivery was perfection. How many of the 36M+ folks watching hadn’t heard of any of it – of any specifics, just that some billionaire wanted to get into their taxes to enrich himself (Because $400B or whatever Elon has isn’t enough for him – he has to have some of yours, too)?

Trump was charming, firm, funny, and confident. 

You want to go where he wants to take the country – you hope the country grows back into that strong America.

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 For all his Trumpisms, you see the possibilities, and Lord knows, we are ready for that 180.

This Trump, the post-Butler Trump, is the best Trump I’ve ever seen. Yeah, we’re going to have burps because he IS Trump, but wowsahs.

What a tremendous start he’s made.

We have a president who doesn’t hesitate to act and who wants this country to be strong again and all of us to thrive.

Most importantly, I KNOW we have a president who’s proud to be an American.

We’re gonna be alright.

Posted in Republican News

China is an Awful Place But You Can’t Say So Online or You’ll Disappear

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In January of 2022 a video went viral in China on the Chinese version of TikTok. It showed a woman in a small rural town who was being held in a tiny room with a chain around her neck.

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Here’s the full clip:

People were understandably outraged and demanded to know what was happening and why. To say this was a big story is really underselling just how massive it was.

It’s one of the biggest credibility challenges Beijing has faced in recent years. The chained woman became a symbol of injustice that brought together liberals as well as nationalistic digital warriors and apolitical moderates. Many of them are worried that the chain on her neck, in a literal and figurative sense, could fall on them or their loved ones.

The video of the chained woman has led to a kind of #MeToo movement on the Chinese internet, in which many people stepped forward to share stories of mothers, daughters, sisters and classmates who were abducted or simply disappeared…

The top three hashtags about the chained woman on the Twitter-like social media platform Weibo have accumulated more than 10 billion views, rivaling those about the Beijing Winter Olympics, which were heavily promoted by Weibo and official media outlets.

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First, the government tried to shrug off the issue by releasing a statement saying the woman was the man’s wife and was chained up because she had mental problems and sometimes hit people. For obvious reasons, this explanation didn’t sit well with a lot of people. If a person has mental problems they should be taken to a hospital, not chained up like a rabid dog.

And the more people looked into this story, the worse it got. it turned out the woman in question had been bought and sold a number of times before winding up with her current “husband.”

Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.

According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.

As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.

Buying women from rural areas is not a rare thing in China. “Little Flower Plum” became the face of a wider problem that the government doesn’t really acknowledge.

Some of the unearthed stories, based on official media reports and court documents, hit home for the Chinese middle class: A graduate student from Shanghai was abducted on a field trip and sold to a hunched man. She was rescued after 71 days. A 13-year-old girl in Beijing was kidnapped on her way to school and sold to a man who constantly beat her up. She had a son at 15 and couldn’t escape until she turned 19. A young woman from Hangzhou was abducted on a business trip and spent the next two decades in a remote village. She was rescued after her son went to college and informed her parents.

But a vast majority of human trafficking victims came from the poorest corners in China. Few were rescued. It was nearly impossible for the women to escape because whole villages kept an eye on them. They would be beaten and locked up after being caught.

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Making this even worse, the husband of this trafficked woman had become a kind of local celebrity who frequently gave interviews to video bloggers. He was respected as a poor man raising his 8 children the best he could. Meanwhile, he was chaining his “wife” around the neck for at least five years before he was discovered, though it seems likely other people in town knew about this long before the public did.

For the communist government, the outrage over this became a big problem. The army of internet minders who monitor everything said online started censoring posts about the topic but the government response went way beyond that. People whose reactions to the video had gone viral got visits from the police. Those who refused to take down their posts and stop posting disappeared. In particular, two women who’d traveled to the village to meet with the woman were denied entry to the local hospital. The responded with an impromptu protest that also went viral.

…they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.

They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.

Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.

“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.

About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.

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So, to sum up, a woman trying to bring attention to another woman who’d been sold into sexual slavery was arrested, beaten and held in prison for 8 months.

In 2023, six people connected to the case, including the “husband” were convicted and imprisoned.

The case horrified the country and led to a crackdown on bride trafficking.

The woman’s husband was jailed for nine years for torture, abuse and keeping her captive. Five others received terms ranging from eight to 13 years.

But many reacting to the verdict on Friday said the sentences were too small and reforms were still lacking.

As for the woman at the center of the story, no one knows what happened to her. Reporters visited the village and learned she’d been dismissed from the hospital but her home now has a guard shack complete with cameras and multiple undercover police officers out front. No one is allowed in or can even take photos of the house. On a second trip to the house the female reporters were followed and then surrounded by angry villagers who threatened to beat them or sell them into slavery if they returned.

So in a way the woman at the center of this has also disappeared. She may be in the house or maybe not. We can hope she’s better off now but no one really knows.

Posted in Republican News

Fetterman on Dems: ‘Sad Cavalcade of Self Owns and Unhinged Petulance’

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John Fetterman remains far more liberal than many conservatives would like, but when it comes to diagnosing the problems the Democrats have right now he keeps hitting the nail on the head. 

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The Democrats embarrassed themselves mightily last night with their childish behavior, mean-spirited harumphing at the president praising ordinary Americans triumphing over tragedy and great odds, and even shunning a young boy fighting cancer, the Democrats did a lot of damage to themselves out of spite. 

If you ever wanted to understand the meaning of “bite your nose to spite your face,” you saw it play out last night in the House of Representatives Chamber at the Capitol. 

Democrats are big mad at Donald Trump as he runs circles around them politically. After years of bashing their heads against the wall to destroy Donald Trump they were soundly rebuked at the ballot box. All they have gotten for the effort is a decisive defeat at the ballot box and a massively empowered Donald Trump surrounded by some of the most ruthlessly competent people in America. 

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Now they are paying the price, and they can’t wrap their bandaged heads around the scope of their defeat. And because they don’t understand why their political ploys and persistent propaganda have failed to dent Donald Trump’s power and popularity, they keep escalating the tactics that have led to their defeat. 

Trump did something last night that is rare for him: he managed to hit emotional erogenous zones for Americans well beyond his MAGA base. There was nary a dry eye in the country when DJ Daniel was awarded his honorary Secret Service membership, but the Democrats managed to become enraged at Trump’s Make a Wish moment. 

It’s one thing for the Trump deranged at MSNBC to make these outrageous statements to an audience that revels in Trump hatred, but quite another for Democratic politicians on the floor of the House Chamber to sit with sour looks on their faces as Trump celebrates American heroes and ordinary people facing and overcoming struggles. 

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Democrats have wrapped themselves tightly in the flag of a foreign country and clung to the idea that Americans will have more sympathy for federal workers than for their own families. 

That is a bad look, and a striking contrast to President Trump’s upbeat message. 

Around 70% of Americans who watched the speech approved of it, and we already know that Democrats in Congress have an approval rating hovering around 20%–half that of Republicans. 

The Democrats didn’t help themselves in the least with their antics last night. It was, as Fetterman says, “”A sad cavalcade of self owns and unhinged petulance.”

Posted in Republican News

Here We Go: DoJ Opens Title VII Investigation Into Anti-Semitism in California Universities

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Remember when the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) allowed their students to set up “Zionist check points” to create a “Jew exclusion zone“? Or when a UC Berkeley professor offered extra credit to students who attended an anti-Israel rally just 18 days after October 7? Or when UC Davis students blocked access to Jewish students as part of their protest against Israel in May 2024?

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Readers may have forgotten these specific incidents. Newly installed Attorney General Pam Bondi has not. Gabe Kaminsky reports at The Free Press that Bondi has launched an investigation into California’s premier state-university system — it has two, the other being the California State University system — for potentially systemic Title VII violations. If the Department of Justice finds evidence of a pattern of discriminatory conduct, it could lose eligibility for any federal funding.

And they aren’t alone:

The investigation comes on the heels of the DOJ forming a task force in February made up of representatives from the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to combat antisemitism. That follows the executive order President Donald Trump signed in his first days in office allocating federal resources to address “the explosion of antisemitism” on college campuses. The order, moreover, directed the DOJ to take immediate action to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

The antisemitism task force is being led by Leo Terrell, a civil rights attorney and recent Fox News contributor. It is under the auspices of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, an office that Trump tapped attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, to lead.

This UC investigation comes less than 48 hours after the Trump administration announced a review of federal funding to Columbia University, which had been a hotbed for anti-Israel activism since October 7, 2023, and where dozens of students were arrested last spring for participating in encampments and taking over a campus building. As The Free Press reported yesterday, Trump’s antisemitism task force is looking into more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to Columbia as part of the review—led by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration.

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The specific focus of the investigation, according to a letter from the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, is apparently employment discrimination against Jews. Two Deputy Assistant AGs from that division warned UC president Michael Drake that they had received enough information “suggesting” violations to open a formal probe. Time to open the books:

Title VII prohibits an employer from discriminating against an individual on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2. When the Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe that a state or local government employer is engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination in violation of Title VII, it is the Attorney General’s responsibility to take appropriate action to eliminate that violation, including presenting the matter to the appropriate court for civil proceedings. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-6(a).

Our investigation is based on information suggesting that since at least October 7, 2023, the University of California may be engaged in certain employment practices that discriminate against employees who are or are perceived to be Jewish or Israeli. Accordingly, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division has authorized a full investigation to determine whether the University of California is engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination as set forth above.

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Interestingly, the letter doesn’t make any mention of Title VI, which involves equality of access to education, violations of which could also suspend eligibility for federal funding. Given the string of incidents on UC campuses, there seems to be at least some reason to investigate the actions by universities to leave Jewish students at the mercy of pro-Hamas radicals on campuses. One can imagine that a parallel probe could launch into those potential violations, or that a Title VII investigation could expand to include Title VI violations as needed. 

This makes two points plain about the new administration. First, they plan to hold Academia’s feet to the fire over its radical politicization of campuses, especially over the last 18 months of anti-Semitic antics. But just as important, they are making a show of using the DoJ rather than the Department of Education to enforce federal law on college campuses. The Trump administration wants to end the Dept of Ed at the earliest possible moment, while its defenders have cited its role in policing the Civil Rights Act in education. Handing that portfolio to Bondi undercuts any reason for a Department of Ed, not to mention escalate the seriousness of that policing significantly. 

That’s the real purpose of this letter — to impress upon Dr. Drake and the rest of Academia that the new administration isn’t fooling around any longer. If they want to turn their institutions into indoctrination hellholes, they can feel free to do so … but without a dime from the federal government. And if they’re discriminating in employment too, then forget about the “feel free” part as well. 

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Posted in Republican News

Pro-Hamas Students Take Over Barnard Library, Police Called In (Update)

Pro-Hamas Students Take Over Barnard Library, Police Called In (Update) 17

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Pro-Hamas Students Take Over Barnard Library, Police Called In (Update) 18

The pro-Hamas students at Barnard College are at it again. For those who missed the backstory, here it is. Last week this group, which is called CUAD, occupied an administrative building to protest the expulsion days earlier of two of their fellow activists. The expulsion was in response to a classroom disruption that happened on the first day of the semester. 

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In an effort to get the school to reverse course on the expulsions, CUAD demanded a meeting with Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury. And after hours of chanting and drumming that disrupted classes in the building, they agreed to a meeting the following day. But that meeting never happened. President Rosenbury said she would only sit down with three representatives from the group if they removed their masks. They refused. And then she expelled another student over a building takeover that happened last spring.

Unlike some other university administrators, President Rosenbury seems to be taking a harder line. Monday she wrote an opinion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “When Student Protest Goes Too Far.”

On the first day of classes this January, four masked individuals threatened both our educational mission and our community by disrupting a History of Modern Israel course at Columbia in which several Barnard students were enrolled. This disruption was not designed to expand thinking or advance civil discourse. Instead, it was a calculated act of intimidation, with the disruptors taunting and loudly speaking over the professor, distributing antisemitic flyers, and refusing to join the discussion even when the professor graciously invited them to sit in on the class.

This wasn’t an isolated incident but an escalation of an ongoing threat to our community. Over the last year and a half, an unauthorized group of anonymous individuals calling themselves Columbia University Apartheid Divest have exploited the conflict in the Middle East to try to tear our campus community — our Barnard home — apart.

They operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and “Zionist billionaires,” and calls for violence and disruption at any cost. They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.

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After recounting the building takeover last week, President Rosenbury said this:

 Even though all of the disruptors wore masks, we now know the identity of many of them and are continuing to identify the rest. We will vigorously pursue discipline and other remedies against those who forcibly and illegitimately entered the building, damaged or destroyed property, disregarded our community expectations, and violated many policies and rules…

Disrupting classes and defacing buildings to intimidate and divide our community is not academic exploration. It is a betrayal of the goals and sanctity of higher education.

As the only administrator who has actually expelled students thus far, I think she means it. Naturally, the pro-Hamas extremists of CUAD don’t care. Today they escalated once again by taking over the lobby of Barnard’s library and pronouncing it a “liberated zone” (shades of CHAZ/CHOP). Here’s their Instagram post:

The caption reads: 

JOIN US NOW MILSTEIN LIBRARY LOBBY! STUDENTS RELAUNCHED THEIR SIT-IN AFTER ADMIN SABOTAGED NEGOTIATIONS, LOCKED DOWN CAMPUS.

Wear a mask and keffiyeh, don’t tap ID, and be brave!

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE WAS A PROMISE! Despite Barnard militarizing campus and inviting NYPD to patrol our academic buildings, we have successfully relaunched our sit-in against the expulsions!

Disruption until divestment! Resistance until return! Agitation until amnesty!

Today, we are here to demand Dean Grinage REINSTATE THE EXPELLED STUDENTS IMMEDIATELY. We are here today in honor of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and all Palestinians under zionist occupation and genocide. We fight for amnesty so we can escalate for Palestine!🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

Nothing will deter us, we will not stop and we will not rest no matter how these institutions try to crush us.

This space is ours as long as we’re here, take back our university. Free Palestine

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And here are some photos and video from the scene.

They hung up a puppet of the president.

And also a wanted poster of the Dean of Students.

There’s no question about what they hope to do here.

As they did last week, Barnard handed out written warnings that students were violating school policies. This may seem ineffectual but in this case I think Barnard is doing what major corporations do when preparing to fire someone. They are creating a written record so no one can later claim they a) didn’t know and b) weren’t warned that their behavior was unacceptable. They have been warned now. If they choose to ignore that warning, that’s going to come up later when they are suspended/expelled.

An administrator of some kind tried to make space so other students using the building could get to class. She was told to shut up.

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President Rosenbury took the group by surprise by calling in and talking to them by phone. She once again offered to meet with up to three unmasked students.

As you can see, the students first refused to leave unless the expulsions were withdrawn and then refused to leave until the meeting with the president the next day. They held a vote but I think the fix was in.

The signed the library guestbook “Death to America.”

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About an hour later a bomb threat was called in to the library but the pro-Hamas students refused to leave. They believe the threat was just a pretext to clear the building.

Police came on campus to clear the building because of the bomb threat. Was it just a pretext? Part of me hopes it was. I’m tired of seeing these vandals treated with kid gloves.

As always, leftists love nothing more than verbally abusing cops.

More chantinng. They are clearly energized at having someone to oppose.

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Will anyone be arrested? Police have warned they may do so but I don’t think it has happened yet.

I’ll add updates if there’s any more excitement. For now the library occupation looks like a failure.

Update: Looks like at least a few people have been arrested.

Gov. Hochul is monitoring the situation.

Maybe as many as a dozen people arrested but most of the pro-Hamas students appear to have been released.

Posted in Republican News

Drip, Drip, Drip, No Worries: UK Launches Working Group to ‘Define’ Islamophobia

Drip, Drip, Drip, No Worries: UK Launches Working Group to 'Define' Islamophobia 19

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Drip, Drip, Drip, No Worries: UK Launches Working Group to 'Define' Islamophobia 20

How can something be a ‘phobia’ if there isn’t an official definition for it?

RIGHT?

Especially when one might already, horrifyingly enough, be living in a country with a penchant for trampling all over the few rights and freedoms its citizens have left in the name of things officially on the books as anathemas to that very same government.

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Things like Facebook posts and flag waving or criticizing government officials. 

They’re ‘hate speech’ now. And as such, will earn you a knock on the door from the prime minister’s Starmtroopers should you indulge in what used to be known as ‘free speech.’

As Professor Turley noted, God forbid you hold truly icky views no decent person would endorse, and, while you live with yer mum, you’ve collected items that make a British bobby’s blood run cold.

We often discuss how defending free speech often means defending those who we find thoroughly  grotesque or offensive.  In that sense, Nicholas Brock, 52, is the ultimate personification of the price we pay for free speech. The neo-Nazi was given a four-year sentence for what the court called his “toxic ideology” based on the contents of the home he shared with his mother in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  In my view, the only thing more troubling than Brock’s hateful views is the decision to criminalize the holding of such views.  It is an example of the continued erosion of bright-line protections of free speech in the United Kingdom and other European countries. Judge Peter Lodder QC declared “I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.” That is a fine distinction that allows for sweeping criminalization of political viewpoints.

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The fellow was one scumbag view too far for the British magistrate’s sensibilities. He hadn’t done anything but live in an England where the right to be a person with vile ideology by anyone’s standards is gone.

…This case is part of a general erosion of free speech in the United Kingdom. We have been following (here and here and here and here and here and here and here) the worsening situation in England concerning free speech. The problem is trying to draw such lines rather than embracing free speech as protecting not just popular but unpopular and even hateful speech. Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. As noted in a prior column, free speech appears to be dying in the West with the increasing criminalization of speech under discrimination, hate, and blasphemy laws.

Unless you belong to one of the protected classes. 

White working-class young girls do not fall into any of those protected categories, but I bet you can guess who does.

…The idea took hold this past November when four of the councils in cities hardest hit by ‘Asian grooming gangs’ preying on their little girls inexplicably voted to declare the term Islamophobic because it ‘perpetuated stereotypes.’

WHUT

Councils where young white girls were groomed and raped by British-Pakistani men have endorsed a definition of Islamophobia that brands the phrase “Asian grooming gangs” as racist.

Oxford, Newcastle, Manchester and Calderdale are four areas where the local councils have adopted a report that critics claim will silence whistleblowers trying to speak out against child abuse.

The report cautioned the phrase “Asian grooming gangs” was a modern repetition of “age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam” of “sexual profligacy and paedophilia, or Islam and violence”, claiming that they “heighten the vulnerability of Muslims to hate crimes”.

It’s always about how the Muslim community will be impacted, is it not? Never about how their members have impacted anyone else’s community.

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The concept of an official British government definition of Islamophobia has been kicked around for a long time but has always been pulled back as the third rail. No one wanted to be the Brit who introduced blasphemy laws to England.

Christopher Hitchens warned of going down that road years ago.

Give it up or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you. This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you. Resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing. You will be told you can’t complain because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it was an accusation of race hatred for example, or bigotry. Where it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion…

And yet?

They are on the precipice of that very thing – that ‘taking away the right to complain‘ and introducing what amounts to blasphemy laws in the land that once birthed the Magna Carta.

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In a country full of extremists.

The ‘Islamophobic!’ accusation was already being employed as a cudgel to crush any further investigation of the grooming gangs plaguing the country and as a tool to smear parents, reporters, and advocates who were demanding justice and answers.

Accusations of “Islamophobia” are being used as a way to suppress the exposure of grooming gangs, a report has claimed.

The government is being urged to adopt a formal definition of anti-Muslim discrimination to be used nationally, which critics have said would effectively act as a blasphemy law.

On Tuesday, a report by the Policy Exchange think tank warned that the term had been “directly used to attack those who sought to expose the Rotherham grooming scandal”.

Andrew Norfolk, the Times investigative reporter who broke the story, was accused of working to “amplify an increasingly prevalent Islamophobia” in a 72-page report by left-wing academics from the Media Reform Coalition.

Sarah Champion, the Yorkshire MP who fought for victims of the scandal, and Dame Louise Casey, who led an inspection of children’s services at Rotherham council, were shortlisted for the “Islamophobe of the Year” award by a prominent UK Muslim group, the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC).

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How nice of the Labour authoritarians to consider giving them government cover to carry on and ‘police fairly.’

Kind of a chilling headline from last month gives you a clue what the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has planned.

Angela Rayner to set rules on Islam and free speech

She’s also the one expanding why the Starmtroopers appear on your door stoop.

…The creation of the council comes on top of plans by the Home Office to expand the recording of non-crime hate incidents for Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

Delightful lady with a serious authoritarian complex.

The UK government has launched its new working group tasked with defining ‘Islamophobia’. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner calls this a ‘crucial step’ in tackling anti-Muslim hate crime and bigotry. In truth, it is laying the groundwork for an official speech code that will make it even harder to discuss some of the most important, sensitive and politically fraught issues of our time.

British citizens will only be allowed ‘reasonable’ criticisms of Islam and they won’t be the folks who decide what’s reasonable and what’s offensive.

…Under the APPG’s framework, deciding what is and isn’t ‘reasonable criticism’ of Islam is a matter of subjective interpretation. The APPG report proposed ‘tests’ for distinguishing between ‘reasonable criticism’ and ‘Islamophobia masquerading as “legitimate criticism”’. Yet such tests are so vague and open-ended that they would be impossible to police fairly. If Rayner’s Islamophobia working group adopts this approach, speech restrictions won’t be judged against objective legal standards, but against perceived intent, leaving those who dissent at the mercy of political and institutional gatekeepers.

The UK government insists that any new definition will be ‘compatible with the unchanging right of British citizens to exercise freedom of speech and expression’. But it is hard to take this claim seriously. The moment a definition like this enters public institutions, it risks becoming a speech code, even if it is not legally binding.

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THEY’LL TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO COMPLAIN

Be careful, my man.

You almost sound as if you’re complaining.

Posted in Republican News