Sen. Lindsey Graham argued in defense of further funding for Ukraine during his appearance on Face the Nation this Sunday. Some of Graham’s remarks were directed at Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who criticized the U.S. government’s financial support of Ukraine and described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Bannons War Room. Consequently, Graham compared the Alabama senator to Americans who sided with Adolf Hitler before the U.S.’s entrance into World War II. The clash between the two Republican senators represents a broader foreign policy divide in the party that has deepened since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. Many of the newer MAGA Republicans, like Sen. Tuberville, are either self-described isolationists or generally skeptical of U.S. intervention in foreign conflicts. The war in Ukraine has done much to highlight this divide among Republicans. “Senator Tuberville’s analysis,” Graham said, “really misses what Putin’s all about — he’s an outlier, I think, in the Republican party.” To stress the point even further, Graham alluded to the 80th anniversary celebration of D-Day, which he described as a “failure” because the U.S. had not intervened sooner. He went on to say that “these are the most dangerous times since the ’30s” and described Tuberville’s position as “what we did in the ’30s, [and] that didn’t work out.” Furthermore, in justifying the continuation of financial support for Ukraine, Graham said that Ukraine “could be the richest country in all of Europe,” referring to the country’s resources, and critical minerals in particular. “I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin,” he said, adding, “if we help Ukraine now, they could become the best business partner we ever dreamed of.” This statement was perceived by critics as being revelatory of an exploitative foreign policy agenda — one that is primarily driven by market expansion and economic growth, often at the cost of the military casualties caused or enabled by U.S. intervention. Postliberal scholar and author Rod Dreher, for instance, reposted a comment on X that said: “Lindsey Graham has just confirmed that they are not sacrificing the Ukrainian people for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy,’ but for Ukraine’s minerals, which are worth trillions of dollars, and the West wants them.” Dreher’s own comment was: “WOW! There it is…this is about minerals.” Steve Bannon, who has been a consistent critic of “neoconservative” foreign policy and was the one to ask Tuberville about Ukraine in the first place, also responded to Graham’s comments while interviewing Strategic Intelligence editor James Rickards yesterday. He began by asking rhetorically: “Is [Tuberville’s view] an outlier of the Republican party? No, it’s pure MAGA. No more money for Ukraine.” He then continued: “it may be outside of the neoliberal neocons,” but “this is what MAGA thinks, this is what ‘America First’ thinks.” The post Sen. Graham Sparks Backlash from Conservatives After Saying Ukraine ‘Can Become the Best Business Partner’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The politician is an animal that believes that voters deposit the envelope in the ballot box with the evolution of the national gross domestic product in mind. They don’t. First of all, most voters vote with their bellies, not their heads. I’m not trying to be judgemental, it’s simply a factual comment. And secondly, ordinary people are not moved at all by the macro data of the national economy, but by what is or is not in their fridge, the cut the government takes from our pockets via taxes, and the evolution of their paycheck over time. A traffic ticket, an attempted robbery at the hands of an illegal immigrant, an absurd green regulation that bans plastic straws, or some stupid prohibition from any local mayor that affects the normal life of the people in town is more critical for the vote than the long spreadsheets with gigantic graphs that politicians toss around. (READ MORE: Will the Sun Shine Again in the Netherlands?) And that is all I have to say about the results of the European elections. Okay. I’ll say something else. The damn plastic bottle caps. A few weeks before the elections, we Europeans began to notice that the caps on bottles, for example, water bottles, can no longer be removed, because a small tab attaches them to the container. So if you want to drink from the bottle, you have to do it by pressing your nose against the sharp edge of the cap. At first, I thought that all the plastic bottle manufacturers had become assholes. But then I said: Could it be an EU thing? And indeed it is. It’s a new regulation recently passed in the European Parliament to save the planet that doesn’t save the planet or reduce plastic or anything, but in return has given me serious nose wounds. Me and millions of other voters. That’s the kind of thing you have in mind when you go to vote. All this green European legislation is being carried out indiscriminately through the moderate conservatives of the European People’s Party, i.e. Ursula von der Leyen, and the Socialists, always allied with the Greens, who up until last Sunday had excessive power in the Brussels House of Representatives. Von der Leyen is German, like Merkel, a Social Democrat like Merkel, and exhibits incredibly stupid approaches to policy, like Merkel. Although she is supposed to lead the European right, von der Leyen has always wanted to be more ecologist than the Greens, more socialist on taxation than the European Socialist Party, and more demagogic and reckless than the Communists on immigration, where she has followed the same line as ill-fated Angela Merkel did when she emitted her famous peace cry “Welcome refugees!” Now the party that wants to put an end to illegal immigration in Germany, AfD, has obtained the best results in its history in a European election and has become the second political force. (READ MORE: A Message From Europe) Most people would see this as a cause-and-effect relationship. But von der Leyen is not “most people.” In fact, instead of seeking alliances with the new emerging right-wingers (anti-immigration, anti-environmentalist, anti-globalist, anti-woke, and pro-national sovereignty) who have multiplied their presence all over Europe, the first thing she has done to save her position as president of the European Commission is to offer a grand alliance to the Socialists. God save America from conservative politicians like that. However, I am happy. The new right (all the idiots parrot “extreme right” but I suspect it’s because they have never seen a right-wing extremist up close in their lives, I see extreme left-wing types on a daily basis — I have fistfuls of them acting as ministers in my country’s government) has won the elections in France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Belgium. And I am going to give you a quick something to reflect upon: Do you know which countries are suffering the most from the EU’s suicidal migration policy? Exactly. (READ MORE: Europe: With Friends Like These …) This has only just begun. Europeans have voted with their bellies because they can’t stand any more idiotic regulations on their lifestyle — no more green taxes, no more obligation to use some damn electric gadget on wheels, no more No-Go Zone neighborhoods in major capitals, governed by Sharia law, where it’s not that they can’t go for a walk with their families, but where the police can’t even enter. Indeed, the Europeans have had enough of it. And von der Leyen and her friends of the “moderate, friendly and smiling right” are still not aware of it. So soon the same will happen all over Europe just like in France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Belgium in these last elections. I’ll bet you a bottle cap it will! The post The Polite European Right Missed the Point appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final are in full flight. News came down recently that college football players will soon receive regular salaries for their play; the best golfer in the world got arrested and booked while trying to get to his tee time; and the United States defeated Pakistan in cricket. The sports world is awash in novelty and intrigue at the moment, but the big sports story that won’t go away is about the WNBA. Yes, that WNBA. The WNBA that lost money every year since its inception in 1997 and exists only due to subsidies from its male counterpart, the NBA. The WNBA whose top players don’t even pull down six-figure salaries. The WNBA whose players fly commercial. The WNBA that has been a staple of stand-up comics for as long as it has existed. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: A Max-less Mad Max) If you look closely, you’ll see many of the players in the WNBA, despite the inarguable benefits of such unprecedented attention, are not liking it one bit. It all has to do with one player — Caitlin Clark. She was a college phenom at Iowa, a talent never before seen on the college stage, ever. She averaged 31.6 points per game her senior season, on her way to more career points than any woman in college history — 3,685 — and any male as well, surpassing even “Pistol” Pete Maravich. Her Iowa Hawkeyes’ championship game against South Carolina in March Madness captured more TV viewers than the men’s championship game. She went No. 1 to the Indiana Fever in the WNBA draft, and 2.5 million watched it on TV, five times more than last year. She’s all over the tube plumping for Gatorade and State Farm and has signed a deal with Nike for $28 million and a signature shoe before playing a single professional game. She is regularly mobbed by fans — lots of young girls — whom she accommodates with autographs. She has inserted the WNBA into nightly sportscasts and made the league relevant. And, other players are ragging on her, fouling her hard, throwing elbows at her, and generally singling her out for rough treatment. In the latest incident, a player from the Chicago Sky, Chennedy Carter, hip-checked Clark to the floor while the ball was not even in play. One of Carter’s teammates, Angel Reese, a nemesis of Clark’s from college days, cheered from the bench, while Clark’s nearest teammate seemed slow to help her up. Why the animosity? Answers are plentiful, and it depends on whom you ask. Some chalk it up to being a rookie, that’s all. Opined sports-talk host Joy Taylor, “You often see rookies get played very tough, get a little message shown to them, especially if they’re coming into a league with a lot of hype.” It’s more arduous for Clark because she is on the small side — 6 feet and 152 pounds — and flies farther when hit by opponents’ hips and goes down faster when opponents’ elbows connect. (RELATED: Blame Envy, Not Racial Division, for Player Hostility to WNBA Superstar Caitlin Clark) Plus, she’s a star so bright she eclipses the league. Radio host Colin Cowherd said, “This is actually kind of like the NBA. Draymond Green, Dennis Rodman, Bill Laimbeer, the enforcers — who do they pick on, the bench guy? No, they go pick on the star.” That’s answer No. 2: Clark’s stardom. Put yourself in the sneakers of an average WNBA player. Laboring in anonymity for your entire career, making little compared to other pro jocks, playing in cavernous echo chambers before thousands of empty seats every game, and receiving virtually no media attention and certainly no endorsements. And here comes Caitlin Clark, fresh out of college, never having played a game, the definition of unproven, but commanding huge endorsement money and regaling in a media glare that is blinding and constant. Would that piss you off? Enough even to take a cheap shot or two? Envy plays a role in the reaction to Clark, without question. Then there’s race and sex. Clark is white and heterosexual. The WNBA is 70 percent black and 38 percent lesbian. Many pundits, while discovering white racism at every turn, are blind to black-on-white racism, and aren’t about to jeopardize their standing in the media by flipping the script concerning Clark. The “racism” they see is not racism at all but merely the predilections of fans’ allegiance and the outworkings of the free enterprise system; fans love some players more than others, and corporations respond by awarding those players endorsement deals. A’ja Wilson, WNBA star, commented about Clark’s ascendancy: “I think a lot of people may say it’s not about Black and white, but to me, it is,” she told the AP. “It really is because you can be top notch at what you are as a Black woman, but yet maybe that’s something that people don’t want to see.” Ignoring the obvious superstar status and endorsement power of such black women athletes as Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, and the Williams sisters, she continued: “They don’t see it as marketable, so it doesn’t matter how hard I work. It doesn’t matter what we all do as Black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug. That’s why it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is.” Commentator Jemele Hill agrees: “We would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “While so many people are happy for Caitlin’s success … there is a part of it that is a little problematic because of what it says about the worth and the marketability of the players who are already there.” We would also be naïve to say her race and sexuality don’t play a role in WNBA players’ treatment of Clark. What they don’t see, or can’t see, is the transformational nature of her game. Like Steph Curry on the men’s side, Clark has taken the women’s game to a new place — specifically, way out beyond the three-point line, out to the logo. There’s nothing more exciting than a long-distance sharpshooter who gets it going, and the way Clark pulls up off the dribble and launches from “downtown” is as exciting as anything in sports. Couple that with her ball-handling ability and her passing, and she exudes charisma on the court. The accessibility and generous giving of her time to her fans only adds to the appeal. Whatever the reason for the rough stuff against Clark — rookie treatment, jealousy, race and sex, parts of all three — the star herself has handled the issue with maturity beyond her years. She deflects questions about the rough stuff with praise for other players and turns discussions toward her interest in furthering the WNBA. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Trouble in the Picklesphere) This is precisely what she is doing. She, in her few short months in the league, has already pumped new life into the heretofore moribund circuit. The hubbub she creates walking through airports prompted the league to charter flights for all teams. Thirty-six of the Fever’s 40 games this year have been scheduled for national TV. Her debut game, broadcast on ESPN, was the most-watched WNBA game since 2001. As of June 2, the Fever had sold out three home games this year (17,274), and six road games as well, and league attendance is up 40 percent over last year. All of that means extra comfort and extra exposure for all WNBA players — the ones who bad-mouth her are flying in those private jets and playing more on TV now, too. Big attendance numbers and increased TV viewership mean more money for the league and more for the players. It will translate into endorsement dollars. But if they take Clark down, it all goes away. The post The WNBA Needs Caitlin Clark appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

One of the more disturbing outcomes of the late 2023 congressional investigation into the prevalence of antisemitism on America’s college and university campuses was the discovery of widespread plagiarism. No sooner was it clear that Harvard president Claudine Gay may have committed publishing piracy nearly 50 times over the course of her career when stories began breaking about the frequency of similar transgressions at Columbia, Brown, and elsewhere. Yet as gravely as plagiarism is (or at least should be) treated within scholarly circles, its impact is typically limited to distorting a reader’s perception of who first expressed some important idea or observation, not the accuracy of the secretly copied material itself. It would be far more consequential if academics were either intentionally or unconsciously misrepresenting facts that could seriously mislead average citizens as well as compromise the usefulness of contemplated social programs. Unfortunately, this later intellectual sin is far more common than generally known. Scientific Studies Are Not As Accurate As They Seem In 2005, a Stanford University professor named John Ioannidis released the results of his investigation into what had previously been considered an unimportant technical problem known as “experimental irreproducibility” — the inability to reproduce the results of a published scientific study. Before then, it had been assumed that the reported outcome of any experiment or research project conducted by a credentialled academic using conventional scientific methods was true and therefore did not need independent verification. (READ MORE: Higher Ed Can’t Study Art Because It Drained the Brains) What Ioannides documented was that the results of many well-known scientific and medical studies could not be replicated when study conditions were rerun. In other words, the research conclusions were either not true or wildly misleading, even though they had long been regarded as “settled science” both by the academic community and the larger public. Ever since Ioannidis’ surprising revelation, other reviews of published scientific research by such respected organizations as the medical journal Lancet and the Federal Reserve indicate that as much as half of what we think we know from modern science is likely false. In 2015, for example, Science magazine tried to replicate the findings of 100 articles published in three prominent psychological journals and found that only 36 of their reruns could reproduce the predicted results. Even more astonishingly, when the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to rerun 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology, the firm’s scientists could confirm only six of the reported findings. This inability to verify reported research outcomes is especially common in the social sciences, where the difficulty of making precise measurements allows both experimenter bias and bad study design to have a greater influence than they would in a physics or chemistry laboratory. In other words, much of what people now think they know about economics, mental health, welfare, education, criminology, race relations, and other subjects relevant to their everyday lives is likely untrue. Among today’s widely held “truths,” supposedly proven by social science but which cannot be documented, include the assumptions that women do poorly in math because they fear being seen as nerdy (“stereotype threat”), that people can be influenced by unconscious stimuli (“social priming”), and that hugging others makes them more trusting and cooperative (“oxytocin effect”). Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald laments the “multimillion-dollar consulting industry” which has been built around helping potential work hires, students, police, and others overcome their lifetime accumulation of unfairly discriminatory attitudes — even though the psychology experiments establishing the existence (let alone prevalence) of this problem have yet to be validated. Leftist Media Ignores Inaccuracies For Good Reason Although news stories about experimental irreproducibility have occasionally surfaced in the mainstream media, it is not hard to understand why a generally left-leaning press has largely ignored both the extent of the problem and, even more importantly, its policy implications. While some inaccurate studies are a result of efforts to boost a flagging academic career with the publication of a seemingly significant discovery, the misleading information contained in today’s research literature is not random. It’s slanted in support of progressive causes. (READ MORE: Religious Instruction During School Day Is Protected for Oklahoma Students) This left-wing bias stems in part from the progressive political atmosphere at major universities and non-profit organizations where most scientific studies are conducted. More than 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Plato promoted the utility of what he called the “noble lie,” a myth designed to persuade skeptical populations that they should follow the wisdom of their better-educated leaders. Today, as Princeton’s Emeritus Professor of Physics William Happer has argued, too many research institutions are contaminated by their own version of Plato’s noble lie — the belief that the social values of Ph.Ds. are “far superior to those in the basket of deplorables.” But a much bigger reason for so much misleading science, as the late social critic Irving Kristol first noted, is that most academic research is funded by federal and state agencies with a constant need to demonstrate the value of the liberal social programs they administer. At the same time, the scientists these bureaucracies subsidize have a vested economic interest in telling their sponsors what they want to hear. The result is the research equivalent of what President Eisenhower talked about when he warned of a military-industrial complex — or, in this case, an “academic-bureaucratic complex.” As National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood likes to put it: while “not all irreproducible research is progressive advocacy [and] not all progressive advocacy is irreproducible, the intersection between the two is very large … [and] a map of much that is wrong with modern science.” Indeed, it is only the mutual backscratching of government and academia that can explain how, by 2014, Washington had spent more than $22 trillion — over half the current national debt — on President Johnson’s largely unsuccessful Great Society programs. Or how decades of education research could produce an American K-12 school system that consistently underperforms relative to other industrial countries. Or why public services in states like New York and California, which rely heavily on social science research to justify how they operate, are viewed by residents as vastly inferior to those in “less enlightened” states. The Problem May Be Willful Ignorance The interesting question, of course, is why so many failed applications of progressively slanted research have not inspired more academics to question their left-wing convictions. Are America’s intellectual elite really so corrupt as to care only about landing the next lucrative government contract? Or, as Thomas Kuhn suggests in his classic sociology of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, do impressive credentials obscure the fact that most professors are not very open-minded? Or even very smart. Perhaps the best answer was suggested by the muckraking social reformer Upton Sinclair more than a century ago when he famously observed that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Sinclair was not implying that the willful ignorance of truth stems from greed as much as from some group becoming too comfortable with an intellectually biasing economic arrangement — in the case of today’s researchers, with their dependence on government subsidies. Whatever the explanation, correcting for politically biased research will not be easy, for the solution lies not in rejecting science but in overcoming the academic community’s resistance to more rigorous study procedures, such as making both raw data and protocols publicly available. Certainly requiring more rigorous statistical methods and even encouraging the independent verification of study outcomes before publication, not after. (READ MORE: Universities Must End DEI and Implement DEI) One indication of how difficult this will be occurred in February 2020, when the Independent Institute organized a conference on ways to tighten up social science experiments. Two graduate students who had been set to speak on the subject had to withdraw after threats of career sabotage from other academics, and many of the commonsense recommendations that came out of the gathering were widely attacked as everything from white supremacy to climate change denialism. Hopefully, the public’s growing displeasure with intellectual narrowness and antisemitic behavior on America’s campuses will soften such opposition to needed study reforms. If nothing else, it sends a message that citizens are increasingly suspicious of what the academy declares to be true, and that it is time for researchers to get back to the job of discovering reality, not trying to control it. The post Leftist Colleges Tend to Produce Leftist Scientific Studies appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In late April 2024, after lectures in several cities in Poland, I visited Moldova and its breakaway province of Transnistria. Together, they approximate the size of the state of Maryland. Located in southeastern Europe, Moldova borders Ukraine and Romania. Moldovans, I can tell you, are worried they might be next on Vladimir Putin’s hitlist. Some 3,000 Russian soldiers are already stationed in Transnistria, a place where sympathies for the old Soviet Union are apparent in still-standing Lenin statues and other communist symbols. (READ MORE: The US Is No Longer a Trustworthy Ally) Considering the behavior of 20th-century Russian regimes, the fear that Putin might move on Moldova (which, like Ukraine, is a non-NATO country) is understandable. Those fears are shared by other nations in the region too — the Baltic states and the Caucasus area, in particular. They have all been threatened, attacked, and occupied by Moscow before. Russian history since 1917 illustrates this point vividly: Concentrated power is rarely content with inflicting evil on its own subjects. Sooner or later it threatens its neighbors as well. Consider just one year, 1924. Georgians Haven’t Forgotten Soviet Aggression The bloodthirsty Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin died in January 1924, triggering a succession struggle from which Joseph Stalin eventually emerged triumphant. Two other events that year showed the world that, no matter who was in charge in Moscow, the Soviets harbored no intention of leaving their neighbors alone. Some 900 miles to the east of Moldova’s capital of Chisinau is Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi. It was there that the “August Uprising” of Georgians against Soviet domination took place in 1924. The country had been forcibly incorporated into Lenin’s empire, but the locals were not about to give up without a fight. They staged a last stand against Soviet rule that lasted more than a month until it was savagely suppressed by Stalin’s Red Army. Stalin, incidentally, was a native Georgian but not opposed to butchering his own people if it was necessary to consolidate communist authority. (READ MORE: Is President Zelensky Still Legitimate?) “This well-organized rebellion in 1924 involved a number of Georgian high-level officers; several thousand people were killed and mass arrests and executions continued for a long time thereafter,” says my friend Gia Jandieri, the founder and vice-president of the New Economic School in Tbilisi. “It is seared into the memory of Georgians who, to this day, understand well from painful experience never to trust the regime in Moscow. It grabs whatever it can, at any opportunity.” What possible threat did this tiny nation in the Caucasus Mountains pose to the vast Soviet Union? None, of course. Power doesn’t need a good reason to aggrandize itself. Inherently expansionist, it is always on the march. In 2008, Putin sent Russian troops into Georgia, and to this day, they occupy a portion of the country and constitute an ongoing threat to the rest of it. In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights found Russia responsible for systematic human rights abuses in those regions of Georgia under its control. The War in Ukraine Threatens Its Neighbors Turn now to Estonia, in December of 1924. The tiny Baltic republic was an independent nation facing a violent uprising shortly before Christmas. Unlike in Georgia a few months prior, the instigators were not freedom fighters but were, instead, communists supplied with arms by Moscow. Their objective was to overthrow the Estonian government and hand the country over to their Russian comrades. This time, the communists lost. Estonians rallied. Government forces defeated the insurgents. The heroes of this fight for Estonian independence were honored with the “Cross of Liberty.” But sadly, liberty would be short-lived. Fifteen years later, as part of the secret agreement with Hitler that started World War II, Stalin invaded and occupied Estonia and its Baltic neighbors. They would not be free again until 1989. Moldovans today are right to be concerned about their future. The Russians are already in Transnistria at the same time their army is savaging neighboring Ukraine. The events of 1924 in Estonia and Georgia were among the very first of a long train of Moscow-engineered atrocities. At least five million Ukrainians were killed during Stalin’s man-made Holodomor, just a few years before the Soviet dictator connived with the Nazis and then rolled over Poland and the Baltics. For decades, much of Eastern Europe lay in thrall to Moscow’s hegemony, punctuated by the occasional armed assaults (as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia) intended to keep it that way. (READ MORE: What the Red Ball Express Teaches Us About Ukraine) Post-Soviet Russia signed an agreement recognizing Ukrainian independence. The U.S. pressured Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons put there by its Soviet overlords. Ukraine complied, assuming that Russian guarantees of its sovereignty were worth the paper they were written on. They weren’t. And the genocide perpetrated by Moscow on Ukraine in the 1930s might very well be repeated should Putin succeed with his war today. Moldovans should worry, and so should decent people everywhere. Europe faces a Russian threat that dates back a hundred years, across two regimes. Whether you support U.S. aid to Ukraine or not, do not delude yourself into thinking that Moscow will stop if it takes Kyiv. Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. The post Putin’s Power Trip May Not Stop with Ukraine appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from TRUNEWS:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Patty McMurray, The Gateway Pundit: Two Idaho farmers, in a desperate attempt to save their crops and those of their fellow farmers, have issued a frightening warning about how the Idaho government has shut off the water to a half million acres of farmland. On Thursday, the East Idaho News reported that the Idaho […]