Is there any behavior by a foreign student here on a visa that’s so bad that he should be deported? Apparently under Joe Biden, the answer was no. It remains to be seen how campus radicals will fare under Donald Trump. Momodou Taal, described in a local paper as a “United Kingdom citizen” and elsewhere as “British-Gambian,” is an international student at Cornell University here on a visa, working on his doctorate in “Africana studies.” This recording in the X post below is reportedly of Taal at a protest in March speaking about fellow protesters and himself being “in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine.” (Warning: Contains foul language.) Pro-Palestinian students at Cornell have been repeatedly violating university policies and disrupting campus spaces since the student assembly voted against their divestment resolution in early February.This was the reaction of one of the ringleaders the day after: https://t.co/Zxhj0phPIK pic.twitter.com/PL1oPzgfxa— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) March 6, 2024 In this other protest clip in the X post below, a man who appears to be Taal calls for students to “continue to agitate, disrupt, until this institution [Cornell University] divests,” by which he appears to mean divesting from Israel and companies doing business with Israel: One of the speakers before they entered the library: pic.twitter.com/23gBJ5t7sx— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 8, 2024 According to The Ithaca [New York] Voice, Taal “has been involved in on-campus organizing efforts since the war in the Gaza Strip broke out Oct. 7, 2023.” At various times, students supporting Palestinian “resistance” to Israel occupied the library at Cornell, staged “die-in” protests, and marched around campus chanting slogans. Cornell accepted that students had a “right to free expression” but said they “must comply with our time, place, and manner guidelines” so that other students and staff could get on with teaching and learning. Taal was at a Sept. 18 campus protest where he allegedly forced his way past police into a hotel event to which he was not invited. Though they kicked him off campus, Cornell eventually decided not to suspend him. If it had, the school would be required to report this to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which maintains the national Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database. Being out of “student status” would eventually make Taal deportable—although many students in that position then make defensive asylum claims (often without merit) so they can stay years longer while those cases work their way through immigration courts. Taal has said, “There will never come a time where I say to myself that I went too hard for Gaza.” At that March protest, he talked about being in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea,” the “armed resistance” would be Hamas or Hezbollah, both of which the U.S. considers terrorist groups. Under U.S. immigration law, “Any alien—who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible” to the United States. If this endorsement is apparent at the time of a visa applicant’s interview with visa officials, the adjudicating consular officer would refuse the visa. If Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined that a student had triggered the “endorse or espouse” ineligibility after arriving in the U.S., it could initiate removal proceedings against the now-deportable alien. Furthermore, the issuing U.S. Embassy or consulate in the student’s home country can revoke his visa, adding a second charge of deportability for being present without a valid visa. That means when the student goes home, he can’t return to the U.S. again. Cornell backed down from sanctioning or reporting Taal due to public pressure. Instead, it allowed Taal to have his cake and eat it, too. He can boast of his “First Amendment rights” yet pay no price for advocating violence. Anti-Israel, antisemitic, and outright pro-Hamas protests continue to take place across the nation. In June, anti-Israel protesters in Washington, D.C., flew Palestinian flags and burned an American flag. They threw objects at National Park Service rangers, defaced public property, and chanted, “Globalize the intifada,” “From the river to the sea,” and other violent slogans. According to reporting from The Washington Free Beacon, a student at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service said, “Several master’s degree candidates, many on prestigious Pickering and Rangel fellowships, attended protests on campus and elsewhere” in Washington. These fellowships come with free tuition, a stipend, and close-to-guaranteed entry into the State Department’s diplomatic service. They are paid for with our tax dollars. At Columbia University in April, students broke into the university’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded the doors with furniture. Young men who may have been students dragged along the ground the American flag that too many men their age died to defend. The Free Beacon reported that police searching the home of the two leaders of George Mason University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter found guns, ammunition, “Hamas and Hezbollah flags and signs that read ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Jews.’” One of the students posted a photo on social media with the caption “Glory to every single martyr in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen … may we avenge our martyrs every single day.” As American citizens of Palestinian origin, these students are not subject to visa revocation, but they are certainly bound by university rules and are responsible if they damaged college property as they are alleged to have done. At the University of Michigan, radicals have vandalized the home of a college regent three times in the past year. In December, they threw jars of urine through his house window and painted “Divest” and “Free Palestine” on his wife’s car. But American universities tend to cave to student demands rather than enforce their own rules. At a congressional hearing in May, the presidents of Northwestern, Rutgers, and the University of California, Los Angeles, were asked how many students had been suspended for antisemitic conduct since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hardly any, was the answer. MIT’s president said she’d get tough on campus antisemites but then backed down “because we later heard serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues,” she said. That tells you where MIT’s priorities are. As recently reported by The Daily Wire, Claremont McKenna College in California offered free consultations with immigration lawyers for illegal alien students and promised “maximum support to undocumented students.” Most student protesters cover their faces because they don’t want to be accountable. When over 100 students from Boston’s Emerson College were arrested at their illegal campus campsite, they asked the newspaper not to publish their photos. While often allowed to break most every rule in the books, some students have been shocked to get arrested, suspended, or even expelled. In student demand letters to their school administrations after campus demonstrations, a common “demand” is to be absolved of any consequences for their actions. A group of Princeton students claimed they would go on a hunger strike until their demands (“divest from Israel,” “cultural boycott,” and “complete amnesty from criminal charges”) were met. Some professors also demanded that no one be suspended. When student Maryam Alwan was arrested at Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in April and barred from campus, classes, and her dining hall, she was supported by students and faculty in her demand to have her charges cleared and receive no suspensions. Today’s protesters have every right to speak freely, but if they break campus rules or criminal laws, or trigger visa bars, they should pay the price. For example, companies don’t have to hire student radicals. A graduate of Georgetown Law School who landed a job with law firm Foley & Lardner had that offer revoked due to her anti-Israel, pro-Hamas activism. A court just rejected her lawsuit to force the firm to hire her. And colleges should follow their own disciplinary rules, regardless of the immigration status—or sex, race, or color—of the student involved. If that means suspending a violator, and that suspension results in him being sent home, so be it. Studying in the United States is a privilege, not a right. The federal government’s power to deport aliens for endorsing terrorism was passed into law after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but as far as I know, has never been  exercised. Its time has come. The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more. Read Other BorderLine Columns: Could Biden Ignore the Law Yet Again to Bring a Million Gazans to the US? Sanctuary Cities—A Dangerous Game We All Lose How Trump Reverses the Destruction Biden’s Pro-Illegal Immigration Ideologues Wrought To Have a Serious Talk About Immigration, You’ve Got to First Debunk the Myths The Mass Hysteria Over Deportation The post When Can Government Deport Foreign Students for Pro-Hamas Protests?—The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Equal Rights Amendment is dead. Not, as Miracle Max put it in “The Princess Bride,” “mostly dead,” but “all dead.” ERA advocates, however, just won’t let it rest in peace. Forty-six Senate Democrats have written President Joe Biden, asking that he help perpetuate the ERA myth even as he leaves office, requesting that he “direct the archivist of the United States to certify and publish the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as the 28th Amendment …” It won’t work. Let’s first get the Civics 101 lesson out of the way. Article V of the Constitution provides that two-thirds of the House and Senate can propose a constitutional amendment, which becomes part of the Constitution “when ratified by … three-fourths of the several states.” Congress proposes an amendment by passing a resolution that has two parts. The first is a procedural clause that includes rules for how the states must consider ratification, such as whether they must use their legislature or a convention, and any ratification deadline Congress chooses to impose. The second part of the resolution is the text of the amendment being proposed. Congress takes one vote on the entire resolution, which is then forwarded to the states. The states have ratified 27 of the 33 amendments Congress has proposed. Eight of them had a ratification deadline, four appearing in the proposed amendment’s text and four in the procedural clause. No one in Congress, or any state legislature, has ever even suggested that Congress lacks authority to set a ratification deadline when it proposes an amendment or that the deadline’s location—in the procedural clause or the amendment text—makes any difference whatsoever. After the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which prohibits sex discrimination in voting, women’s groups started pushing for an amendment guaranteeing general legal equality between men and women. The first ERA resolution to reach the two-thirds threshold was House Joint Resolution 208, introduced by Rep. Martha Griffiths, D-Mich., in March 1972. It proposed this language: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” Two years earlier, the House passed a Griffiths resolution with this language, but the Senate did not vote on it. Griffiths sought to add a seven-year ratification deadline, saying it would help “gain united support for the amendment.” Women’s groups all supported the addition, which Griffiths placed in the procedural clause of Resolution 208. She predicted, however, that the states would ratify the 1972 ERA “in record time.” She was wrong. While 30 states ratified the 1972 ERA in the first year, only five more did so by the March 1979 deadline—and five of those ratifying states rescinded their approval. Congress passed a controversial resolution adding 39 months to the original deadline, but no additional states got on board. The Congressional Research Service has repeatedly said that, as a result, “the ERA formally died on June 30, 1982.” Just as everyone knew that the 1972 ERA’s ratification deadline was valid, everyone knew that the deadline passing with no more than 35 ratifying states meant the ERA’s demise. When asked about the 1972 ERA’s status on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in January 1986, feminist leader Gloria Steinem explained that “because it was not ratified in the nine years allotted to it, it now has to start the process over again, and … be passed by the House and the Senate and go through all of the states’ ratification process.” While no one disputed Steinem’s conclusion back then, advocates pretend that she never said it, urging more states to ratify the 1972 ERA today, even though it has not been pending before them for more than 40 years. When three states—Nevada in 2018, Illinois in 2019, and Virginia in 2020—passed resolutions purporting to ratify this nonexistent amendment, advocates claimed the three-fourths constitutional threshold had been reached and the ERA was now part of the Constitution. Well, not so much. A federal judge in 1982 ruled that the 1972 ERA’s ratification deadline was valid and, therefore, it was no longer pending before the states and could not be ratified. More recently, three lawsuits by states seeking to force the archivist of the United States to formally publish the 1972 ERA all failed. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, during administrations of both political parties, has issued opinions affirming Congress’ power to set a ratification deadline for a proposed amendment and to place it anywhere in the proposing resolution. The latest opinion, in 2020, concluded that, because the 1972 ERA’s ratification deadline expired, it “is no longer pending before the States.” In addition, it said that “Congress may not revive a proposed amendment after the deadline has expired.” Which brings us back to the Senate Democrats’ letter to Biden. They want him to order the archivist to do what his own Justice Department argues the archivist has no obligation to do. Their letter notes that Article V does not impose a time limit for ratification of a proposed amendment but never mentions the Supreme Court’s unanimous conclusion that Congress may do so. The letter argues that the archivist must publish the 1972 ERA as the 28th Amendment because his predecessor published a previous proposal as the 27th Amendment. The letter skips the part where the 27th Amendment was pending indefinitely because it had no ratification deadline, while the 1972 ERA expired when its deadline passed with insufficient state support. When it suits them, ERA supporters loudly deny that it has anything to do with abortion. In a hearing on April 30, 2019, for example, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the ERA’s longtime primary House sponsor, flatly insisted that “the Equal Rights Amendment has absolutely nothing to do with abortion …. It has nothing to do with abortion.” Today, the opposite position suits them, and the Senate Democrats’ letter to Biden argues that the ERA “is the most effective means at our disposal to prohibit restrictions on women’s reproductive care nationwide.” The letter has a laundry list of problems and issues that, it claims, the ERA would solve: “equal pay and opportunities … reproductive rights … domestic violence and harassment … gender and pregnancy discrimination.” In hearings, ERA advocates have also included economic inequality, “victim-blaming,” maternal mortality, equality for “marginalized genders,” and even “intergenerational wounds.” No constitutional provision, and certainly not the ERA, can address any of these things. Unlike legislation, which applies to people, the Constitution applies only to government. No one likes to lose. ERA advocates gambled in 1972 that the ratification deadline would prove irrelevant when 38 states quickly ratified Griffiths’ ERA resolution. That gamble failed and, as a result, the 1972 ERA is not mostly dead, it is all dead. Attempting to perpetuate this fraud undermines the Constitution, misleads the American people, and ultimately discredits the ERA advocates’ cause. Senate Democrats’ demand is especially bizarre because the Biden Justice Department has already rejected it. In its brief defending the archivist against the states suing for the very same thing Senate Democrats want, the DOJ argued that the states “have not identified any relevant legal authority requiring the Archivist to certify the adoption of an amendment ratified after a deadline imposed by Congress.” Neither did Senate Democrats in their letter. The late Justice Antonin Scalia’s description of a discredited Supreme Court precedent applies today to the Equal Rights Amendment. It is like “some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.” If the ERA ever had a justification, it was achieved decades ago without amending the Constitution, and the attempt to add this unnecessary amendment failed. The ERA is dead. It’s time that its supporters woke up to that reality. The post Unsurprisingly, Democrats Call on Biden to Break the Law Before Leaving Office appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Former President Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Joe Biden nomination—and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years. As such, he and his coterie proved to be the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history. Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere. Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard-left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg. The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia. Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term: “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.” The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power. But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation—hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government. And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything—the presidency, the House, and the Senate. An inert Biden is departing office with a 36% favorability rating in a recent Emerson poll. His Democratic nominee replacement, losing presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, also has virtually vacated her office with 40 days left of her tenure. Failed candidate Harris has been roundly faulted by staffers and donors for blowing through some $2 billion in assorted 2024 campaign money. She ended up doing worse against Donald Trump than Biden himself had in 2020. Many Democrats believe that they might have done just as well had Biden stayed on the ticket even in his vastly diminished state. The Obamas were further blasted for nullifying the wishes of 14 million primary voters by forcing Biden off the ticket—ironically in the same backroom, antidemocratic manner they had cleared the way for him in 2020. Obama emerged from his comfortable retirement to hit the 2024 campaign trail, schooling the country that President-emeritus Trump was a dictator, a fascist, a tyrant, and, of course, a “racist.” The more Trump polled even with, or ahead of, Harris, the more an exasperated and ignored Obama talked down to supposedly low-information voters. But by the time Harris lost the election, voters had tuned out a nagging and patronizing Obama—and his stale, now-dated “hope-and-changey” boilerplate speeches. What Obama did not mention, but what the voters knew, was that the border was more secure under Trump than during either the Obama’s or Biden’s tenure. Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded countries during the Obama and Biden administrations, but stayed put on Trump’s watch. Obama’s bizarre vision of a new Middle East had sought to empower Iran as a supposed counterweight against moderate Arab nations and our ally Israel. Years ago, Obama invited the Russians into Syria, empowered dictatorial Syria, berated Israel nonstop, and all but ignored the violence of Iran’s surrogate terrorists: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. But after Oct. 7, 2023, Israel retaliated to the mass slaughter of Jewish civilians with all-out war against Hamas and Hezbollah—rendering these once feared terrorists nearly impotent. In an exchange of air attacks with Iran, Israel showed the world that Iran was as militarily weak as its chanting and threats were tiresome and shrill. Iran is now tottering on the brink, as its terrorist appendages—including most recently the Assad dynasty in Syria—are melting away. Israel and the moderate Arab regimes are in ascendance, as the entire crazy Obama-envisioned Middle East agenda melts away. The 2024 anemic Democratic campaign and the Trump Electoral College and popular vote victories—combined with record defections of Hispanic and African American voters from the Democratic Party to Trump—proved a resounding rejection of the Obama legacy and his surrogates’ left-wing visions. Yet after the people spoke in the election, the more Obama whined that democracy itself had failed him. Voters, he remonstrated, who disagreed with him were written off as racist and sexist. Obama again harped that constituents did not know what was good for them. And then, the disappointed former community organizer suddenly disappeared—pondering to which of his own four mansions his private jet would fly him home to commiserate. COPYRIGHT 2024 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY LLC We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Stench of BO: Barack Obama’s Mystique a Casualty of the Election appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Catholic health care system CommonSpirit partners with an online women’s health clinic that offers abortion pills and referrals for surgical abortions. CommonSpirit Health announced in 2021 it would partner with Ask Tia to create “a new front door to health care for women.” The partnership, uncovered by the pro-life organization Save the Storks, “enables the two health care leaders to launch Tia-branded women’s health clinics together that will provide comprehensive, blended virtual and in-person care.” In short, the Catholic health care system provides Ask Tia a conduit to promote abortion as a “commonplace” aspect of women’s health. CommonSpirit Health is the largest Catholic hospital chain and the second-largest nonprofit hospital chain in the United States. It operates more than 700 care sites and 142 hospitals in 21 states.  CommonSpirit’s mission statement promises to “make the healing presence of God known in our world” and to “improve the health of the people we serve, especially the most vulnerable.” After the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Ask Tia announced it was “expanding our scope of practice to provide medication abortion through virtual visits.” Founded in 2017, Ask Tia sends abortion pills without an in-person appointment to women who meet its criteria. “We definitely want to be in the business of abortion,” Ask Tia’s chairwoman, Carolyn Witte, told Axios in November of 2022. The online clinic is committed to “explicitly supporting abortion access by providing our patients with counseling covering any and all options (parenting, adoption, and termination), mental health support, and for patients who choose termination, well-coordinated care to trusted, high-quality abortion providers—just like a referral for fertility services or obstetrical care.” On the other hand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.”  “I am saddened that a successful Catholic healthcare system would partner with an abortion provider, negating their mission to serve the most vulnerable—the preborn,” Diane Ferraro, CEO of Save the Storks, told The Daily Signal. “We know that the Catholic Church values the sanctity of life, yet CommonSpirit is defying that value by backing an organization that provides abortions.” Ask Tia provides intrauterine device (IUD) insertion at its physical clinics, and birth control prescriptions—both of which violate the teachings of the Catholic Church. It also offers referrals for in vitro fertilization. Ask Tia operates nine physical clinics across New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. According to Ask Tia’s website, it specializes in health care for “people assigned female at birth,” but many of its providers specialize in “comprehensive care for people of various genders, including gender-affirming care and hormone replacement therapy.” “f you’re looking for gender-affirming care, Tia’s care coordination team can ensure you’re matched with a clinician with this training and expertise,” the website says. Gender-affirming care is a euphemism for transgender medical interventions such as cross-sex hormone regimens and surgeries. The Catholic Church teaches: “Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.” Ask Tia and CommonSpirit did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the partnership. The post Catholic Health Care System Partners With Pro-Abortion Virtual Women’s Health Clinic appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The rapid demise of the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has taken every geopolitical analyst and self-proclaimed Middle East “expert” by storm. Following 53 years of brutal Assad family rule and 13 years of bloody civil war, the Syrian strongman abruptly fled for asylum in Moscow as rebels finalized their encircling of Damascus. In the blink of an eye, one of the two Ba’athist Arab states—along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before the U.S.-led 2003 invasion—was no more. Start with the obvious: Assad was a world-historical tyrant, even by bleak Arab world standards. He led with an iron fist, incarcerating political enemies and siccing his totalitarian security apparatuses on all those whom he deemed a threat. (You can see where Democrats may have gotten some ideas.) Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, he racked up a death toll of over half a million—the majority civilian noncombatants. He has used chemical weapons against his own people on multiple occasions. He allied with the very worst actors on the world stage, and by the time he fled, his regime had become a satrapy held in joint custody by two rogue states: Russia and Iran. There are thus many reasons to be ecstatic that Assad, a minority Alawite in a majority-Sunni country, is no more. From a Western geopolitical perspective, it is a clear positive that Russia has lost easy access to Mediterranean ports, and Iran has a gaping hole in its “Shiite crescent” of influence, which, in the not-so-distant past, extended from Iran through Iraq and Syria into Hezbollah-overrun Lebanon. And from a humanitarian perspective, one of the very worst butchers in recent global history has been deposed. The problem, as is so often the case, is the thorny question of what comes next. And therein lies the rub. The American foreign policy establishment is dominated by “right”-neoconservatives and left-neoliberals. Both camps seek, above all, to weaken and topple authoritarian regimes, and to replace them with leaders and government forms that better fit the idiosyncratic mold of Western liberal democracy. Thus, you have pundits such as Josh Rogin, a columnist for the neoconservative/neoliberal Washington Post, who posted this thoughtless dreck to X last weekend: “Syria is free. The rebels won. The people liberated themselves from tyranny. … The world should celebrate Syria’s liberation & help it succeed.” Come again? Apparently, “free[dom]” now means … Sharia law. Did we just forget about the Arab Spring? Never let stubborn facts get in the way of a handy one-size-fits-all narrative. But it is grossly irresponsible to ignore the new bosses in Damascus. The rebels who toppled Assad are led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a man who has spent the better part of his adult life as a peripatetic jihadist mercenary. Al-Julani has, in the past, been active with al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq, and Al-Nusra Front. These are all radical Islamic terrorist organizations, plain and simple. Al-Julani now leads Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which is—you guessed it—yet another U.S.-recognized foreign terrorist organization. Al-Julani, who has ditched his trademark jihadist camo for sleeker Western-style garb, says he is a changed man. “I believe that everyone in life goes through phases and experiences,” he explained to CNN. This followed al-Julani publishing a statement asserting that “diversity is a strength.” Call him the DEI jihadi. If your antennae are going off, you’re not alone. A grizzled, Recep Tayyip Erdogan-backed jihadist now spouting liberal platitudes about “diversity” is perhaps the single least persuasive political operation of my lifetime. Dunderheads in Foggy Bottom and Langley, Virginia, must be happy, but only a dimwit or a ruling-class neoconservative/neoliberal moralist—but I repeat myself—could be naive enough to believe this rubbish. On the whole, it is probably a good thing that Assad is no more. It is important that two of America’s leading geopolitical foes, Russia and Iran, suffer such a massive loss. For Iran in particular, it is the second massive loss in a span of two and a half months, following Israel’s historic crippling of Hezbollah. But we should not pretend that the rise of HTS and al-Julani is an unambiguous good. It isn’t. There is a very real risk of a full-on ISIS/Taliban-style caliphate taking over Syria. That would be a humanitarian disaster for the region’s Kurds and Druze, a likely strategic disaster for Israel and America’s moderate Arab allies, and a more insidious disaster in its potential activation of jihadi sleeper cells throughout the West. And Turkey’s Erdogan, an Islamist strongman and Hamas mollycoddler who harbors frightening neo-Ottoman ambitions, is emboldened like never before. Of course, al-Julani and HTS could also turn Syria into a giant Ivy League-style DEI bureaucracy. Maybe the Harvard faculty lounge would then self-deport to Damascus. At least that sounds like a win. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post How Not to Think About Syria appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Lawmakers in Michigan—one of the most fiercely contested battleground states in the 2024 presidential election—will consider an amendment to the state Constitution to ensure that only citizens vote.  Michigan state Rep. Bryan Posthumus, the No. 2 Republican in the House as floor leader, says that next month he will propose a constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to produce proof of U.S. citizenship during voter registration and a government-issued photo ID when casting a ballot.  Current Michigan law allows either an ID or a signed affidavit.  Posthumus’ proposal is in response to a Chinese national who cast a ballot this year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during early voting.  Although the Chinese national reported himself, local officials said the vote was still counted because there is nothing to be done after a ballot goes through a tabulator. He was charged with illegally voting and perjury for falsely stating in an affidavit that he was a U.S. citizen when registering to vote. “They can no longer say this is a right-wing conspiracy theory. A foreign national voted in Michigan,” Posthumus told The Daily Signal. “The reason we know he voted is because he stood up and told on himself. Now that people know it can be done, what’s to stop others from trying to illegally vote again?” The Michigan proposal also comes after eight other states enacted laws or approved constitutional amendments on the November ballot to ensure that only U.S. citizens can vote.  Please support this effort by Leader Posthumus. https://t.co/cpa7p7PvXr pic.twitter.com/bEwxv2h7xc— Ronna McDaniel (@RonnaMcDaniel) December 11, 2024 As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” there have been numerous adjudicated cases of foreign nationals who registered to vote and indeed voted in past elections.  Joining Posthumus as co-sponsors of the Michigan measure are three fellow Republicans who are former election clerks—state Reps. Jay DeBoyer, Ann Bollin, and Rachelle Smit.  This is a “commonsense, no-brainer issue,” Posthumus said, noting a Gallup poll days before the Nov. 5 election showed 83% support for requiring proof of citizenship to vote.  “I hope Democrats will come along and make this bipartisan,” he said.  Legislation to amend the Michigan Constitution requires bipartisan backing. Democrats control both the Michigan House and the state Senate. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also is a Democrat.  In Michigan, a state constitutional amendment may be achieved  in two ways. One is a joint resolution adopted by two-thirds of the House and Senate (74 votes in the House, 26 in the Senate).  The other way is for voters to approve the constitutional amendment in a ballot initiative.  “If the legislation fails, it’s going to be on the ballot,” Posthumus said. “If it fails, I’ll lead a citizens’ initiative.” The proposal to require voters to prove U.S. citizenship will face opposition. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson—a Democrat who is the state’s chief election official—argued that Arizona and Kansas had problems with similar state laws.  “I’m always open to serious and well-thought-out efforts to further strengthen our secure system,” Benson said in a public statement. “But many of these proposals will prevent large numbers of eligible citizens from exercising their constitutional voting rights in the name of making it even more difficult and rare than it already is for a noncitizen to vote.” In 2022, Michigan voters approved Proposal 2, a Benson-supported amendment to the state Constitution to expand early voting, establish a right to vote absentee, allow local governments to accept private in-kind contributions to run elections, and require the state to pay for ballot drop boxes.  “Michigan’s voters have overwhelmingly passed constitutional amendments in recent years to ensure that eligible citizens aren’t denied their right to vote,” Benson said. “We should respect their will and focus our efforts on policies that actually improve security, such as a guaranteed source of state funding to ensure clerks have the resources they need for every election.” If the citizenship measure is successful, Michigan would catch up with a national trend. In November, voters in two other battleground states—Wisconsin and North Carolina—approved citizen-only voting initiatives on the ballot. Also approving such measures: voters in Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.  In 2022, constitutional amendments requiring U.S. citizenship for voting were approved by voters in Louisiana and Ohio. In 2020, similar constitutional amendments were approved in Florida, Alabama, and Colorado (a blue state). In 2018, voters in North Dakota approved such an amendment.  Census data shows that 21.7 million noncitizens lived in the United States as of 2022. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, according to the Only Citizens Vote Coalition.  Also, every noncitizen who is legally authorized to work in the U.S. is eligible to get a Social Security number.  No state constitution explicitly allows foreign nationals to vote. By law, the District of Columbia and local jurisdictions in California, Illinois, Maryland, and Vermont allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but not in statewide or federal elections.  This approach, however, requires election officials to keep separate lists of registered voters. Advocates of election integrity argue that keeping separate lists can be difficult and that noncitizen voters could slip through the cracks in state and federal elections. In July, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which would require that states obtain documentary proof of U.S. citizenship before a voter is allowed to register to vote.  The bill, not yet taken up by the Senate, would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as the “motor voter law.” The post Battleground Michigan Set to Debate Citizen-Only Voting Initiative appeared first on The Daily Signal.

During his first term, President-elect Donald Trump took to calling Mar-a-Lago—the 62,500-square-foot, Spanish Revival-style mansion that doubles as a private club and Trump’s private residence—the Winter White House or the Southern White House. That Mar-a-Lago is again the Winter White House probably makes Marjorie Merriweather Post, the breakfast cereal heiress who built it in the 1920s, smile from beyond the grave. Upon her death in 1973, Post donated the residence to the National Park Service, hoping one day that the compound would be used as precisely that.  As Trump has been the center of gravity of American politics for nearly the past decade, the right’s most politically connected are frequently seen orbiting Mar-a-Lago and, more broadly, Palm Beach, Florida.  Washington creatures aren’t the only ones seen on the club grounds these days, however.  Over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump brought anti-woke entrepreneurs and financiers into the fold. Mar-a-Lago’s clientele reflects as much. Not only is Trump’s club the Winter White House, it might also be called Winter Wall Street. But Mar-a-Lago’s business-oriented guests aren’t the establishment types—the likes of Roger Altman or Reid Hoffman. They’re often young and ambitious. They’re plugged into crypto and artificial intelligence. They’re embracing the values of Trump’s America First movement and now they’re looking to capitalize on it for themselves and their investors. Take James Fishback, for example. The 29-year-old hosted a breakfast Dec. 5 at Mar-a-Lago to announce the launch of Azoria U.S. Meritocracy, an exchange-traded fund. Azoria ETF, co-founded by Fishback and Asaf Abramovich, friends who met in college, will refuse to put its investors’ dollars into the hands of corporations that implement quota-hiring systems in the name of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. In other words, Azoria ETF has been described as “an S&P 500 fund without the woke s–t.” “We’re here today for one simple reason,” Fishback said in his remarks at Tuesday’s Mar-a-Lago event. “America’s greatest companies have long thrived on a straightforward yet powerful principle: Hire the best person possible for the job.” “That’s how these companies became engines of innovation that have delivered windfall profits to shareholders and changed the world in the process,” he said. “In recent years, however, many of these companies have been captured, infected by a new orthodoxy that rejects the time-tested principle of meritocracy,” Fishback continued. “They’ve instead embraced something new and toxic: hiring on race and gender.” “These companies that end up earning subpar returns by running their businesses like a Model U.N. tournament as opposed to a profitable enterprise,” he told the crowd. Azoria has identified three dozen companies in the S&P 500 index that have publicly admitted to racial and gender hiring quotas. “These three dozen companies,” Fishback said, “span different industries, from tech, health care, financials, consumer goods, and more. They employ over 3 million people and have a combined market cap of nearly $3 trillion.” Despite their differences, they all “share one critical flaw,” Fishback said: “They reject meritocracy in favor of forced diversity, and their returns are suffering as a result. Year to date, a portfolio of these anti-meritocratic companies has returned just 12% compared to the S&P’s 30[%].” Expand the time span to the past three years, and the chasm only gets wider. “Over the past three years, the anti-meritocratic bunch has returned 17[%] compared to the S&P’s 60[%],” Fishback said at Mar-a-Lago. “And this isn’t just one or two stocks holding down the index. It is the fact that this is a widespread, systemic issue. Over the past three years, 70% of these anti-meritocratic companies have underperformed the plain old S&P 500.” Fishback’s Azoria not only will seek to secure higher returns for investors by refusing to invest in corporations with hiring quotas. It also will frequently lobby companies and corporations to abstain from or abandon woke hiring practices. Azoria’s first target for change: Starbucks. The Daily Signal had the opportunity to speak to Fishback more about Azoria’s potential impact. “We’re going back and forth with Starbucks as we speak right now,” Fishback said. “The fact that they are engaging with us at this level means that we have the facts on our side.” “We’re not trying to micromanage [these corporations]. We’re drawing a line in the sand, and that line is if you hire on skill or ability, you’re in; if you hire on race and gender or anything else, you’re out,” he told The Daily Signal. “And so that means the 500 companies in the S&P 500 get reduced down to about 465 as a result.” “The premise is really simple,” Fishback continued. “Companies that hire on skill will outperform those that hire on race. For folks who want to purge their portfolio of those anti-meritocratic underperformers, they should see a better performance than simply investing in an S&P index fund from the likes of BlackRock.” While Azoria aims to ensure great returns for its investors, for Fishback and Azoria’s supporters, it’s about more than just money. It’s about a broader restoration of American principles to the nation’s private and financial sector. Hiring quotas are “a rejection of the values that made America great and a perversion of sound business practices in America,” Fishback explained at the Mar-a-Lago event. “The color of your skin and the body you were born into have absolutely nothing to do with what you can bring to the table.” The work Azoria will do is a foil of what Trump’s movement, Make America Great Again, has done for American politics, he suggested. “President Trump won a historic landslide [because] … Americans of all walks of life sent a resounding message. And the message was also one of rejecting the toxic divisiveness, the toxic politics of saying that one race needs special treatment over another,” Fishback told the crowd. “We’re going to deliver on this mandate in the private sector,” he said. “We’re going to look to President Trump’s leadership and what he’s doing in the public sector. Both of us are going to be, I think, successful—just a question of who gets there first.” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, also featured at the Mar-a-Lago event, said Trump’s victory and the emergence of enterprises such as Azoria are a testament to the fact that Americans “have far more similarities than differences.” “It seems that that’s really the operating thesis for Azoria,” Roberts said. “That from Starbucks to whatever the next company you’ll be involved in may be, that you’re simply trying to restore this balance to the American investment marketplace.” In recent years, the American Right has become hyperfixated on the need to create alternative institutions. It’s no surprise this effort has coincided with Trump’s time on the political scene, given how institutions—business, media, finance, or governmental—have organized and attacked not only Trump but his supporters writ large. The Right’s creation of these parallel institutions already has paid dividends, especially in the media space. But creating an alternative media institution is one thing; the barriers to entry are relatively low. Creating an alternative financial institution is another thing entirely. Fishback and other innovators in this space face their own unique challenges. Nate Fischer, founder and CEO of the investment company New Founding, told The Daily Signal that one such challenge is inherent in the financial industry’s current structure. “I’ve argued that DEI is in many ways a natural ideology for managerial organizations,” such as financial institutions, Fischer said. “If you’re just touching something narrow like DEI, you may be offering a product that’s not sufficiently differentiated.” Fischer wasn’t implying this was specifically the case with Azoria, but a challenge that any alternative financial institution faces given the current structure of the finance industry. “And if the evolution toward ESG, DEI, etc., is a natural outgrowth of the model of business and finance that we have embraced, it’s very difficult to go against that tide,” he said. “The general challenge to building alternatives is you need to reinvent,” Fischer said. “You need to invent something new, and that’s hard. It needs to be new and it needs to have an actually differentiated risk profile. There needs to be something doctrinal, from an investment perspective, about the difference and I think that’s crucially important.” Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs, told The Daily Signal that these challenges are especially pronounced in exchange-traded funds.  “ETFs are a very scaled game because the fees have to be low,” Krein said. “So you got to have a lot of assets, and it’s tough to get high AUMs [assets under management] when you’re a new fund without a track record and without a lot of the big infrastructure.” Meanwhile, he said, other big financial and consulting firms will petition the same companies to stay the course on their nonmeritocratic hiring practices. “There are a ton of statistics out there that show more diversity leads to greater returns. It seems a little dubious that it would just be so perfectly aligned like that,” Krein said of the statistics peddled by these big corporations. “The issue is that why are they going to listen to you when you have, you know, $100 billion in your ETF, versus BlackRock and the others that have trillions of dollars in their ETF? Your statistics better be really good.” Fischer said he believes the barriers for alternative financial institutions to break through are twofold. “One is, it’s a risk-laden space,” Fischer said. “You create a financial product, and you’re asking people to trust their money with you. That is a high stakes decision that generally is dependent on long-standing social capital, long-standing trust.” Because it’s a risk-laden space, “regulation massively compounds” those barriers, he said, citing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “It makes it much harder for finance,” Fischer said. “Whether that be SEC regulation, which has often been a restriction on, say, spaces like crypto where there has been real innovation or at least alternatives that tend to have different cultures developing.” The other barrier Fischer points out is much more pernicious. “Increasingly, the vast majority of capital is allocated by bureaucratic allocators like pension funds hiring investment consultants,” Fischer said. “They tend to use sets of rules that make it very difficult for new entrants to play in that space, especially not new entrants who essentially are cultivated and credentialed not inside the club.” The nature of this bureaucratization makes challenging these industry titans all the more difficult, he said. “If you’re actually challenging the dominant values of that club,” Fischer said, “you’re going to have a hard time getting the initial traction, getting the early adopters, getting the early allocators, who help you get past that hurdle that allows you to compete in the space of pension funds.” It’s this “downside-focused, sort of follow-the-herd mindset of bureaucratic operators versus entrepreneurial ones” that can prove a tough nut to crack, he said. “And so the dominance of bureaucrats in capital allocation means that anyone who departs from the bureaucratic hierarchies and the bureaucratic norms is going to be at a severe disadvantage,” Fischer said. Fishback and his colleagues have become well acquainted with those barriers in starting Azoria. “Obviously, there’s a lot of investment that goes into building out the infrastructure, finding the right partners, the right counterparties, making sure we have the right exchange,” Fishback told The Daily Signal. “So you’re right. It’s not as simple as throwing up a podcast on X as an alternative to, say, The New York Times. It’s definitely a heavier lift.” “But the reason why we’re willing to bear this cost at Azoria is because there’s literally no one else doing this,” he said. “There is no other ETF, no other publicly traded investment fund that excludes companies that are anti-meritocratic and, as a result, are underperforming.” “There’s a lot of alternative financial managers out there,” Fishback continued. “I have a lot of respect for them, and some of them are pitching themselves as a patriotic fund or a MAGA fund. But for Americans, there needs to be a publicly traded alternative to the BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, plain old traditional S&P fund.” The moral hazard, however, is that as Fishback and Azoria are more successful, the exchange-traded fund will become less differentiated from other investment product competitors.  But, Fishback told The Daily Signal, “there’s still going to be a role to play.” “Just as this ideology came and infected these companies practically overnight, it could happen again. And so the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” he said. “If these companies like Starbucks abandon these policies tomorrow, it doesn’t mean that they can’t reinstate them two, three, four years down the line and harm shareholders and employees again.” As the coalition that Trump built over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign aims to shake up Washington, its members with a more entrepreneurial and industry-focused mindset are looking to seize this unique political moment in the marketplace. Although the broadness of this Trump coalition offers great opportunities, there’s plenty of work to do in the public and private spheres to channel its efforts into effecting real change. “The coalition right now is basically just everybody who objects to the kind of left-progressive orthodoxy, establishment, whatever you want to call it,” Krein said. “It’s this array of forces against this sort of dominant liberal-progressive consensus that has been dominant for 30-plus years.” Before Jan. 20, when Trump will be sworn in for a second term, it’s no surprise that Mar-a-Lago is serving as this coalition’s meeting place.  The challenge for members of the Trump coalition in the private sector, New Founding’s Fischer said, is to build not only alternative institutions but truly innovative ones. “I think we need not just alternatives, but alternatives that really reflect a different way of allocating capital, one that’s more driven by skin in the game, by human judgment,” Fischer said of these alternatives. “The disparate coalition probably can hold together,” American Affairs’ Krein said. “But I don’t know that it can succeed in the sense of actually implementing a successful agenda, building a new consensus, and making itself a new establishment.” “The new consensus is the true goal of success in politics, in my view,” he said. “So I think it can hold together just as a purely oppositional force, but I don’t know if it can win in creating a new positive agenda for itself.” What’s taking place at Mar-a-Lago during this period of transition “proves that President Trump is the great unifier, and there’s nothing more unifying than aspiring for success,” Fishback told The Daily Signal. “There were folks in that room who aren’t traditional Trump supporters, who may have just come around to supporting him in this recent election,” Fishback said of the Azoria event Dec. 5. “They recognize what he brings to the table is a transformative, first principles view of government.” “This is a merging of the public sector led by Donald Trump, the private sector led by firms like Azoria, to bring the whole country together,” Fishback added.  “There’s only so much that government can do. President Trump is going to be a transformative president, but the private sector, we’ve got to be involved,” he said. “We’ve got to listen to the mandate that voters gave him on Nov. 5. And that’s why we did this on Dec. 5. We wanted to reveal our plan to deliver that from the private sector and to the private sector.” The post Entrepreneurs Look to Capitalize on Trump’s Mandate appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A conservative group is demanding documents from the Justice Department that could shed light on whether former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe or his wife played any role in the campaign to sic federal law enforcement on parents who protested school boards in 2021. In a statement to The Daily Signal Friday, McCabe said neither he nor his wife played any role. “The FBI exists to protect everyday Americans from critical threats—not to target them for speaking out against injustice,” Will Scolinos, counsel at America First Legal, said in a statement first provided to The Daily Signal. “AFL and congressional investigators have established that the Biden-Harris administration in Washington, D.C., had weaponized the federal government to target parents without reason and contrary to law,” he added. He was referring to the National School Boards Association, which sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Sept. 29, 2021, that compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists. Using that letter as a pretext, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the Justice Department on Oct. 4, 2021, to investigate alleged threats to school boards. The DOJ developed a “threat tag” to track parents who might pose such a threat to school boards. “This investigation follows up on our prior work by focusing on whether the FBI was directly or—through Democrat activist and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe—indirectly involved in the whole-of-government assault on parental rights in Loudoun County, [Virginia],” Scolinos explained. America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act request Thursday, demanding all documents related to the Garland memo, the NSBA letter, the Loudoun County School Board, and mentioning or referring to McCabe or his wife. Who Is Andy McCabe? McCabe, who served as deputy director of the FBI between 2016 and 2018 and acting director in 2017, reportedly discussed with then-agent Peter Strzok an “insurance policy” for the FBI to continue its investigation into alleged ties between Donald Trump and Russia if Trump were to win the presidency in 2016. In 2019, McCabe told CNN he did not recall any such discussion. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that McCabe, then deputy director of the FBI, had lied to then-FBI Director James Comey, to other FBI agents, and to others about leaks to a Wall Street Journal reporter. McCabe contested the findings, which featured prominently in then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to fire him right before he could retire in 2018. He sued for wrongful termination and ultimately settled with the DOJ, receiving the pension he had been denied. Horowitz concluded that McCabe orchestrated a leak to The Wall Street Journal because a previous Journal article had “questioned McCabe’s impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” That article said that a political action committee run by Virginia’s Democratic then-governor, Terry McAuliffe, had donated nearly $675,000 to McCabe’s wife, Barbara J. McCabe, in her ultimately unsuccessful 2015 state Senate campaign. Parental Rights Battles America First Legal suggests that McCabe’s wife may have played a role in the parental rights battle that proved fundamental to the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, in which Republican Glenn Youngkin prevailed over McAuliffe. Parents began to protest at school board meetings in 2021, challenging COVID-19 policies such as mask mandates and opposing classroom instruction based on gender ideology and critical race theory (the ideological lens through which America is viewed as institutionally racist in favor of white people against black people). Parents in Loudoun County protested its School Board over these issues. America First Legal’s Freedom of Information Act request described key aspects of the parental rights battle that, AFL maintains, suggest the McCabes’ involvement. Members of a Facebook group called “The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” suggested targeting members of the community for speaking out at School Board meetings, and the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office opened a criminal investigation into the group in March 2021, according to a local Fox News affiliate. Six School Board members, the local Commonwealth’s Attorney, and a member of the County Board of Supervisors took part in the group. On May 28, 2021, a 15-year-old male student forced a girl to commit sex acts at Stone Bridge High School. The same student went on to sexually assault another girl in the girls restroom at Broad Run High School on Oct. 6. The Loudoun County Juvenile Court had found the perpetrator “not innocent” of charges of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio. The student also pleaded “no contest” to charges of abduction and sexual battery on Oct. 6. Then-schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler said in a June 22, 2021, School Board meeting that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.” After that statement, Scott Smith, the May 28 victim’s father, spoke out and was arrested and eventually convicted on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. (Virginia’s governor, Youngkin, would go on to issue a complete pardon to Smith after he won election campaigning on parental rights.) On the evening of May 28, an FBI agent called the Loudoun County Emergency Communications Center to inquire about the incident after the Stone Bridge principal sent a message to the community describing the incident in vague terms. The emergency center told the FBI agent that the incident involved a sexual assault under investigation by local law enforcement, and the agent said it would not require his assistance. According to America First Legal, members of the Loudoun County School Board and their allies made numerous reports to local and federal law enforcement alleging that they had been threatened or harassed for their advocacy for COVID-19 policies, critical race theory, and transgender policies. Members of the community discussed having a contact with the FBI that was monitoring local issues in Loudoun County. The Loudoun County School Board appointed Jill McCabe to be a formal adviser on Dec. 17, 2020. She advocated for the School Board’s transgender policies at a June 22, 2021, board meeting. For his part, Andy McCabe served as a keynote speaker at a Loudoun County Public Schools event on cybersecurity in April 2022. “The evidence suggests the Attorney General’s October 4 Memorandum is the byproduct of and/or a key Biden administration ‘deliverable’ in a collusive scheme, coordinated directly or indirectly with local actors in Loudoun County, Virginia (among other places), to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate parents in the free exercise or enjoyment of their rights or privileges secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States,” the America First Legal information request claims. McCabe’s Response “I have had nothing to do with the FBI since my termination in 2018,” McCabe told The Daily Signal. “In 2021, my wife (a pediatrician and the medical director of the pediatric emergency department at Inova Loudoun Hospital) served on a health advisory board for the Loudoun County school system,” he noted. “Neither she nor I had anything to do with the FBI, the DOJ, Merrick Garland’s memo, ‘school safety’, a ‘left-wing school board group’ or Loudoun County school parents.” “Any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false,” he added. Loudoun FBI FOIA 12.12.2024Download The post What Role Did Ex-FBI Head Andy McCabe’s Wife Play in Gov’t Weaponization Against Parents? Conservative Group Demands Answers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A new documentary from Palladium Pictures and The Wall Street Journal examines how Britain’s permanent bureaucracy—nicknamed “the Blob”—played a pivotal role in ending Liz Truss‘ brief tenure in late 2022 as prime minister. Through interviews with Truss and other key players, director Michael Pack, a former CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, reveals how unelected technocrats and civil servants—Britain’s equivalent of the American deep state—pushed back against her economic reforms, ultimately leading to her resignation after just 44 days in office. Pack spoke with The Daily Signal about the growing power of Britain’s administrative state—and lessons President-elect Donald Trump should glean from the episode as he assumes power in the United States. “The Blob is a lot stronger than you think,” Pack told The Daily Signal. “A lot of people on the Republican side seem to be pretty confident that they’ll be able to radically reform the departments and organizations that they’re nominated to head. But I think the Liz Truss story suggests ‘the Blob’ has a lot of power to fight back.” Watch the full interview, premiering at 2 p.m. ET Saturday, or listen to this special edition of “The Daily Signal Podcast.” This is Pack’s second documentary with The Wall Street Journal. His first film of the series, “‘Get the Jew’: The Crown Heights Riot Revisited,” debuted in October. It tells the story of the America’s worst antisemitic riot, which took place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991. “The idea of the series was to cover events or things that happened in the past that were either misreported, ignored, or just sent down the memory hole,” Pack explained. Pack’s most notable film, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” tells the remarkable story of the legendary U.S. Supreme Court justice. With his latest documentary, Pack hopes to educate Americans about the fights facing the incoming Trump administration as it seeks to reform Washington. From his time at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Pack has firsthand experience with America’s version of “the Blob.” “In my own little world, I did see what it was like to face the administrative state,” Pack said of his seven months as CEO. “Most of us, myself included, tend to think of the administrative state as an American problem, and the Liz Truss documentary makes clear that it is a problem of the West,” he added. “These bureaucrats are the same in London, Paris, New York, D.C. They go to the same colleges, they’re taught the same ideas.” Watch the full documentary below. Learn more about Palladium Pictures’ incubator fellowship for America’s future storytellers. The post Inside ‘the Blob’: How Bureaucrats Brought Down Britain’s Leader appeared first on The Daily Signal.

THE CENTER SQUARE—New York’s population could decline by more than 2 million people over the next 25 years as fewer people are born in the state and more people move out, according to a new report. The study by Cornell University’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy’s Program on Applied Demographics projects that New York faces a significant population decline due to low fertility rates and aging that has not been offset by new arrivals. “The projections confirm what we have been seeing for some time, which is that if the demographic trends in the state do not change, its population will continue to decline,” Jan Vink, lead analyst for the study, said in a statement. “Conservative estimates suggest a population decrease of 1 million by 2050, but we think an even greater decline is more likely.” Researchers found that the number of New Yorkers ages 0-17 is projected to drop between 10% and 25% over the next 25 years amid a decline in the number of births. Meanwhile, the state’s population is projected to decline from the current 19.7 million to about 17 million by 2050, mostly through outmigration, the researchers said. The study, which was partially funded by the state of New York, comes as Albany leaders have become increasingly concerned about outmigration from the state and its potential impact on the economy. Bills seeking to improve the state’s business sector and boost its competitiveness are expected to be filed in the upcoming legislative session.  “Policymakers want to know to what extent the crystal ball of demography can project the future of New York state’s population so they can plan for the future,” Cornell Population Center Director Matt Hall said.  Experts say New York’s outmigration has less to do with politics than it does with a lack of housing, prevailing wages, and access to employment. However, federal data shows that the population decline has major implications for the states, as well as revenue and tax collections. New York lost more than $14.1 billion in state-adjusted gross income between 2021 and 2022 as residents fled to New Jersey, Florida, and other low-tax states, according to the latest Internal Revenue Service data. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has blamed a lack of housing as the primary reason New Yorkers are fleeing the state, making the case for expanding housing stock and making existing homes more affordable. But Republicans have long argued that New York’s outmigration is being driven largely by the state’s highest-in-the-nation tax burden, a business sector struggling under excessive regulations, and rising labor costs. Originally published by The Center Square The post Report: New York Population Could Shrink by Millions in Coming Years appeared first on The Daily Signal.