A California man who illegally imported a Roman mosaic looted from Syria has been sentenced to three months in federal prison after being convicted on one count of entry of falsely classified goods. The maximum possible penalty was two years in federal prison. Even that would have been going way too easy on him. The charge is that he lied on customs forms to import an illegally acquired object, which he certainly did, but that doesn’t even begin to describe the filth he was wallowing in when he trafficked this 3rd/4th century floor mosaic. The timing is what struck me as particularly disgusting. In August of 2015, Mohamad Yassin Alcharihi, who is of Syrian origin, smuggled a Syrian mosaic into California during the period when ISIS was actively engaged in the destruction and traffic of Syria’s ancient heritage for profit. Literally the same month that Khaled al-Asaad was tortured and executed, sacrificing his life to save the cultural patrimony of Palmyra, this … person … only saw the slaughter and cultural erasure as an opportunity to make a buck. A quick summary of the charge he was sentenced for: Alcharihi declared to his customs broker that the shipment contained 81 modern vases and ceramic tiles from Turkey worth a total of $2,199. In actual fact, he had paid $12,000 for an ancient mosaic that he had declared to customs was nothing but “ceramic, unglazed tiles” valued at $587. The false classifications occurred months after the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution condemning the destruction of cultural heritage in Syria, particularly by the terrorist organizations Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Al-Nusrah Front. The mosaic was placed inside a large metal shipping container holding many vases and two other mosaics. An x-ray image of the container taken by CBP showed that the mosaic was hidden in the front of the container – away from the rear access doors – behind a pile of vases. After passing through customs, the mosaic was shipped via truck to Alcharihi’s home in Palmdale, California. Alcharihi then spent $40,000 to have the mosaic restored so he could resell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but before he could arrange the sale, FBI and Homeland Security agents executed a search and seizure warrant on Alcharihi’s home on March 19, 2016. The mosaic was found in his garage and confiscated. (As a mildly entertaining aside, the forfeiture portion of a case is structured as the government versus the object being confiscated, so going through the court motions you get to read things like: “IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that upon the arrest of the defendant One Ancient Mosaic….”) The mosaic is 15 feet long, eight feet tall and weighs one ton. It depicts Herakles liberating the Titan Prometheus who had been chained to a rock on the Caucasus Mountains, condemned by Zeus to have a giant eagle eat his liver all over again every day for the transgression of having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humanity. In this scene, Hercules is about to shoot his arrow into the eagle, while Zeus and another figure (Hermes?) watch from a cloud. To the left is a woman with child looking backwards as they flee, probably from the eagle. There’s a missing section on the left side between the leg of the woman and the partial eagle. I’m guessing the gap in the tesserae originally a tree, balancing the one on the right, that anchors Prometheus’ chains. I’m not sure who the woman is. My potentially cockamamie theory is it’s Io with her son by Zeus, Epaphus. In the version of the myth recounted by Aeschylus in his tragedy Prometheus Bound, Io encounters the chained Prometheus who foretells her future. In the play, Io is no longer in human form when she meets Prometheus, and her son isn’t born yet. She’s been transformed by vengeful Hera into a heifer and hounded by the goddess’ minions until she reaches Egypt where she is finally restored to her human form and gives birth to Zeus’ son, which is what Prometheus told her would happen. I think the mosaic is compressing different parts of the myth, a compositional technique which people who saw the mosaic back then would have recognized. After his arrest, Alcharihi quickly admitted under questioning that he had indeed falsified the customs information, that the mosaic was ancient, not modern tile, and that he had paid 12 grand for it, not less than $600, and that he had poured another $40,000 into the restoration with the prospect of selling it for much more than that. A government expert who examined the mosaic estimated its market value at $450,000. Even with him readily confessing to the one crime he was ultimately convicted of, four years passed between the seizure of the mosaic and the indictment. Another three years passed between indictment and trial. Finally, a year after that, on August 28, 2024, he was sentenced. The mosaic is still in secure storage in Los Angeles where it will remain until repatriation is arranged. This was going to be a single post, but after reading a number of court documents and being flabbergasted at the many stages of sheer stupidity behind so foul a crime, I’ve decided to split it into two. The full background story and chronology of events deserves its own spotlight. Tune in tomorrow for the sequel: Sometimes, Evil Is Just Really, Really Dumb.

This could mean better treatments.

Peet Montzingo and his mom have the most delightful relationship, as evidenced by their joint videos on Montzingo's social media platforms. And one viral video sums up the sort of fun Montzingo and his unique family engage in.The video is a compilation of clips of Montzingo following his mom around with a trombone, making silly sound effects as she goes about doing chores and normal daily life things. It's simple and silly, which is what makes it so wholesome. People can't get enough of their gentle bantering.Watch:The impromptu Star Wars duel is the best, isn't it?Montzingo has millions of followers on YouTube and TikTok, where he regularly shares videos about life in his family. At 6 foot 1 inch tall, Montzingo stands out—literally—from his parents and siblings.As his mini bio from IMDB reads:"Peet is from Seattle, Washington. He is the only average height member of his family (his mom, dad, brother and sister are little people), which immediately put him in the media spotlight growing up. In February of 2019, he scored a spot as a touring/recording artist in the band 5WEST, touring South Africa, Spain, and Europe. They did their first arena tour as the supporting act for Boyzone autumn of 2019. During the pandemic in 2020, Peet cultivated a massive presence on Tiktok and continues to post his wholesome videos alongside his singing career."Montzingo advocates for little people in a way that is humorous and light-hearted in addition to being educational. For instance, watch him and his mom illustrate how to (and how not to) talk with short people: @peetmontzingo i actually get this question all the time so hope this helps!!! @queenmamadrama #little "I actually get this question all the time so hope this helps!!!" he wrote in the caption of the video demonstrating various cringey ways to talk to a little person before ultimately showing that you should just stand normally. Montzingo addresses lots of questions people have in his videos, including whether or not he's actually adopted. This makeover video with his mom is surefire proof that he's got her genes, as the resemblance at the end is uncanny. @peetmontzingo low key this process was traumatizing? @queenmamadrama What makes Montzingo's videos so popular is the way he and his family use humor to destigmatize dwarfism and normalize the lives of little people. His mom's house is designed for little people living, with short counters, sinks and furniture, and Montizingo laughs at his challenges as a tall person when he visits her. It's what he grew up with, however, and he shows how much he loves his family and the physical differences between them. Montzingo's unique role in his family means he can help bridge gaps as an advocate for little people, and it's great to see him doing so in such a wholesome and entertaining way. This article originally appeared on 12.9.21

Not as linear as he had once thought. The post The Nine Inch Nails album Trent Reznor thought has no focus: “I was afraid about what was happening” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The United States is deep into a season of severe discontent. Our politics are polarized, our Congress is moribund, and our purchasing power has tumbled. A Gallup poll in early 2024 showed that only 20 percent of Americans are satisfied with the “way things are going.” Nearly 70 percent believe the country is on the “wrong track.”  Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it. While innumerable failures of government factor into this public cynicism, evidence suggests that U.S. immigration policy is among its most powerful components. Despite our self-image as a “nation of immigrants” and our public celebration of “diversity,” a growing number of Americans sense that immigration, especially in its most frenzied illegal form of the past three years, is implicated in some of the country’s most vexing problems.  Significantly more Americans name immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. (28 percent) than any other single issue, including “government.”  This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine. Given President Joe Biden’s widely disparaged policies on the southern border — U.S. Customs and Border Protection numbers show 12.5 million border crossers from 2021 through 2024 — this could hardly be otherwise.  While net totals are difficult to parse, the bottom-line data from the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey shows that since Biden took office in 2021, the nation’s foreign-born population has grown from 45 million to 51.4 million as of February 2024 — an increase of 6.4 million. This number excludes most of those whom the U.S. Border Patrol calls “gotaways,” the estimated 1.8 million people who were detected making it across our southern border but were not caught. Altogether, roughly 8.2 million newcomers have come into the country and stayed in the past three and a half years, an estimated 3.7 million of whom are here illegally. Today, the foreign-born make up an estimated 15.5 percent of the total population, surpassing the record set in 1890 of 14.8 percent. Though Americans have reason to affirm the familiar immigration platitudes — such as that immigration accelerates economic growth and spurs the production of more and cheaper goods and services — the deleterious effects of recent in-migration have become too obvious to ignore, dividing Americans and shaking our trust in government and in each other. While higher-paid workers continue to enjoy the benefits of cheap immigrant labor — new restaurants, well-coiffed golf courses, bountiful residential landscapes, and affordable nannies — it is now undeniable that the entry into the labor market of millions of low-skilled laborers has dampened the wages of the poorest native-born and established immigrant workers, those who compete against newcomers for jobs. As immigration economist George Borjas puts it, “Competition from immigrants dramatically reduces the wages of the workers whose qualifications most resemble theirs.” In the U.S., immigrant workers have accounted for more than half of the seven million workers added to the labor force over the past 15 years, and many of these workers lack a high school diploma. Thus, the foreign-born account for 19 percent of workers overall, but 32 percent of those in occupations with median earnings below $30,000 per year.  The result has been a sharp decline in overall wages and salaries as a percentage of total national income. The think tank American Compass has shown that the compensation accruing to labor as a percentage of gross domestic product has declined from 63.3 percent in 2000 to 56.7 percent in 2020. According to American Compass, when adjusted for inflation, the average wage of production and nonsupervisory workers was $28 per hour in 2022, the same as it was in 1972, offering fairly definitive proof that when employers face a growing market of low-skilled laborers, there is little incentive to raise wages. Evidence that nonselective mass immigration hurts low-wage workers is so overwhelming that even longtime pro-immigration organizations have begun to concede this fact. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, for example, reported in May 2024: “Sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (specifically, average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023.” If the wall of silence surrounding the harm to low-wage workers has begun to crack, it would be a mistake to think the damage ends there. Tech industry salaries, for example, have long been smothered by H-1B and other college-related visa programs, which have pitted young American college graduates against overseas tech workers desperate to work for less.  And economists have long suspected that the endless infusion of cheap labor has discouraged investment and automation in industries such as agriculture, keeping productivity growth — the “mother’s milk” of rising incomes — low.  Less talked about, however, is mass immigration’s substantial contribution to a more universal crisis: affordable housing. Home prices have doubled in the last decade, with much of that growth happening in just the last four years, and homeownership is increasingly out of reach for the average American. In February 2024, the median home price nationally was $400,500, and, according to real estate giant Zillow, the minimum income required to afford that home rose to $106,000, up from $59,000 in 2020. It’s little wonder, then, that a March 2024 Harris poll found that 61 percent of renters who want to own a home agreed that “no matter how hard they work, they’ll never be able to afford a home.”  While numerous factors contribute to the seemingly inexorable rise in housing costs, it is obvious that large numbers of new residents — from anywhere — put upward pressure on prices and rents. Consider the numbers.  The U.S. currently builds around 1.5 million housing units annually, barely enough to meet the demand for the 1.5 million new households formed in a typical year, often when people move out of their families’ homes. Even if residential vacancy rates were unusually high (they are not), the arrival of around 2.5 million newcomers from abroad each year would generate a need for more housing than can reasonably be built. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Albert Saiz estimates that an “immigration inflow equal to 1 percent of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rents and housing values of about 1 percent.” This rate of increase, according to Saiz, “suggest[s] an economic impact that is an order of magnitude bigger than that found in labor markets.”  Given the close relationship between homeownership and family formation, the housing crisis is implicated in another troubling crisis: the “birth dearth.” Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the number of births in 2023 (3.59 million) was lower than in any year since 1979, while the number of children a woman in the U.S. is expected to have in her lifetime has declined to 1.62, the lowest rate ever recorded.  Once again, while there are numerous factors involved in record-low birth rates, recent declines in marriage and childbirth correlate inversely with the financial inability to house large families. At stake in all of this, writes urbanist Joel Kotkin, “is the future of America as an aspirational country,” a nation where if a person works hard, stays out of trouble, and manages to save a little, they and their children will have a stake in national prosperity.  The truth is that since 1965, the year the Immigration and Nationality Act kicked off the enduring wave of 70 million people to the U.S., the country has become starkly more unequal. Numerous data points bear this out, but a chart appearing at the website Statista seems most salient. It makes the point that in 2022, CEOs at the nation’s 350 largest publicly owned companies received 344.4 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers in their industry. In 1965, CEOs earned 20.4 times the annual average salary of workers.  In a review of economist George Borjas’s 2016 book We Wanted Workers: Unravelling the Immigration Narrative, author Christopher Caldwell writes, “A big problem with the mass immigration that began in the United States in the 1970s was that it bred inequality.” In fact, the most enduring attribute of non-selective mass immigration, Caldwell concludes, “is not wealth creation. It is not entrepreneurship. It is not diversity. It is redistribution from the poor to the rich.” If recent immigration’s effect on American economic life is less sanguine than we have been led to believe, its adverse effects are not limited to economics. While more difficult to gauge, demographic changes resulting from successive immigrant waves have undoubtedly played a part in the radicalization of American political life that first became apparent in the 2010s with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movements.  This shift to the extreme left was recently made most evident in the paroxysm of anti-Israel, antisemitic, and anti-American sentiment on college campuses after the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel.  After the attack, U.S. campuses exploded in a virulent mix of the familiar progressive extremism and revolutionary anarchism. However, perhaps for the first time in the U.S., the protests included a generous helping of Islamism and Arab nationalism. Exhortations to “globalize” Palestinian terrorism “from New York to Gaza” and “from the river to the sea” were accompanied by a deluge of 505 antisemitic incidents in the first three months following the attacks.  Americans, 80 percent of whom remain strongly supportive of Israel, were genuinely shocked that so many protesters could support Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group established in 1988 with a charter calling for the murder of Jews and the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic society where Israel now stands.  It was also difficult not to notice the large contingent of foreign students involved in and sometimes even leading the protests. Up until that point, the more than one million foreign students enrolled at American universities had rarely come up as a topic of public concern. Neither had the fact that 5.8 million students, as of 2022, were immigrants or children of immigrants. But after October 7, it seemed reasonable to ask what influence the foreign and immigrant students (and faculty) had in the political transformation of American campuses.  Higher education researcher Neetu Arnold of the National Association of Scholars wrote:  [P]rotests are now havens for foreign students, especially those from Arab and Muslim countries, with their own set of nationalist and tribal grievances against Israel and the United States. In some cases, such foreign students appear to lead the protests in their pro-terrorism chants — some of which are in Arabic, or translations of Arabic slogans. It is hard not to conclude that the growth in the percentage of immigrants and their children from 19 percent of the student population in the 1990s to 32 percent now has contributed in some ill-defined way to the evident political extremism.  This is especially so in light of the stunning recent book by George Mason University economist Garrett Jones, The Culture Transplant, which documents mounds of evidence that immigrant groups hang onto substantial parts of their native cultures even after four generations of residing in the U.S. One assumes this non-assimilation includes those groups from the democracy-hating Muslim-majority countries. The marked decline in support for free speech among college students — and the general public — may be another indication that this is so.  The pro-Hamas protests solidified the growing perception that our immigration and student visa policies have failed America. More Americans, for example, now say legal and illegal immigration make the United States “worse off” (38 percent) than say it makes the nation “better off” (28 percent). It also helps explain why a Gallup poll from July 2024 found that 55 percent of American adults would like to see the number of new arrivals decrease. This is the first time since 2005 that a majority of Americans have said this. That the preference of a majority of Americans for a more cautious approach to immigration has not been reflected in policy is a scathing indictment of our political system and its uneven distribution of power and representation.  Those searching for a reason why only one in ten adults “give high ratings to the way democracy is working in the United States or how well it represents the interests of most Americans” need look no further.  Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine. The post Unchecked Immigration Has Transformed America appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Charlie Hustle went to that great clubhouse in the sky Monday. He died unattended in his La Vegas home. No cause of death was given, though it’s known he had cardiac procedures done. He was 83. Pete Rose’s life contained both triumph and tragedy. It was splendid on the baseball field between first pitch and the end of the game, but often a train wreck off of it. Most fans of the Grand Old Game are familiar with Pete’s gaudy list of accomplishments as a player, his awards, his records, his endless highlights. In 23 seasons as a player and player-manager, most of them in his native Cincinnati as a member of the Reds, Pete collected more base hits, 4,256, than any Major League player ever. Before he accomplished this in 1985, Ty Cobb’s previous record of 4,191 was thought to be unreachable. In his prime, Pete was a perennial .300 hitter. He won three batting titles and one MVP award and helped Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine to two world championships. He led both teams with 10 base hits and a .370 batting average. His Reds beat the Boston Red Sox in 1975 in what many consider the greatest World Series of all time. He was a regular starter in the National League’s All-Star lineup. He finished his career with a .303 lifetime batting average. But it wasn’t just the numbers he put up that will imprint Pete’s memory on the minds of baseball fans forever. It was also the way he played the game. He richly deserved the sobriquet “Charlie Hustle,” as he knew only one way to play the game. That was all-out, flank-speed, attack on all fronts, take no prisoners. Had all players approached the game like Pete did, America would suffer productivity losses in spring and summer as most of the population would be watching baseball games. Pete played both football and baseball in high school, and brought the football mentality to the diamond. On base, he was a ballistic missile. He played in an era when baseball, especially around second base and home plate, was still a contact sport. (Kinder, gentler rules lately have eliminated much of this carnage.) Opposing infielders and catchers knew not to get in his way unless they had their affairs in order. Catcher Ray Fosse of the Cleveland Indians famously learned this when Pete knocked him into low earth orbit to score the winning run in the 1970 All-Star game. Pete was criticized for doing this in an All-Star game, which is basically an exhibition game, nowadays not taken seriously at all. But it was a baseball game, and Pete took all baseball games very seriously. He didn’t have a soft pedal. But when the shouting was over and the fans went home, life wasn’t as rosy for Rose. Addiction is a slippery concept, often used loosely. I don’t like to use it at all. But it’s fair to say after putting his body on the line in a ball game, Pete like to put his money down after hours. The man did like to gamble. Had he stayed with the slots and the ponies, all would likely have been well. But when he extended his betting to baseball games, including those involving the Cincinnati Reds he was managing at the time, his sure Baseball Hall of Fame selection was derailed. Then–Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti cast Pete into baseball outer darkness in 1991, suspending him for life. No more jobs in baseball. No Hall of Fame. For the sin of gambling on the game, which has always been verboten, he was made a baseball non-person, which he remained until his death. Pete’s personal life was otherwise messy, with two divorces, and a lost paternity suit. He leaves behind two ex-wives and five children. A man shouldn’t be judged by the comments of his ex-wife, which of course represent only one side of the case. But I recall his first wife Karolyn appearing on a talk show. From memory, two of her comments stick out: “As a human being, Pete was a great ball player.” And, asked about Pete’s intellectual interests, she replied: “The only book I ever saw him read was The Pete Rose Story, and he skipped parts of that.” Funny, but Pete had no chance for on-air rebuttal. For all the post-game missteps, baseball fans would rather focus now on his heroics on the field than on the various ways he ran amok off of it. Giamatti’s decision to ban Rose for life, especially the no Hall-of-Fame part, was controversial with fans. I was fine with banning him from jobs in the game, which fans have to believe is straight on the field. But banning him from the Hall seems as much like punishing the fans as punishing Pete. Pete finally admitted betting on baseball, but insisted he never bet against the Reds when he was managing, which he could have choreographed to his advantage. Out of the game, Pete kept body and soul together very nicely selling autographs and meet-and-greet sessions with his estimable self. It’s reported he made in the neighborhood of a half million dollars yearly doing this. Took a bit of the sting out of not having a plaque in Cooperstown. In fact, he was at a sports show in Tennessee the day before his death. Charlie Hustle. Hustling to the end. RIP. And thanks for the memories. The post RIP Pete Rose — Few Played the Game Even Remotely Like Him appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

And again. As October arrives — with barely a month left until the 2024 election — the Washington Post and the Washington/national left-wing media, legal, and political establishment is betting on election interference to steal — er, “win” — the election for the Democrats. Mysteriously, a new court filing by Smith was “unsealed” to lay out “new evidence that Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election were taken as a private candidate.” Notice the game here? Trump’s 2020 efforts to ensure election integrity have been deliberately recast as subverting the results. Which is to say, honesty and integrity in counting election returns is not to be tolerated. And the last-minute, right-before-the-election unsealing of “Special Counsel” Jack Smith’s filings is supposedly a public service — not what it clearly is: election interference. The Post prints all of Smith’s filing. And it is indeed interesting, filled as it is with decidedly partisan untruths ill-disguised as a supposedly accurate portrayal of Trump’s post-2020 election conduct. Examples abound. Here’s but one: When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). Stop right there. The actual crime was blocking an accurate and truthful counting of ballots by the voters of those named states. And it was Trump who was demanding election integrity. As noted in this space, when it comes to Pennsylvania, there is a long history of voter fraud. Here is just one headline from back in the day: New York Times: Vote-Fraud Ruling Shifts Pennsylvania Senate The Times reported this in its 1994 story:  Saying Philadelphia’s election system had collapsed under “a massive scheme” by Democrats to steal a State Senate election in November, a Federal judge today took the rare step of invalidating the vote and ordered the seat filled by the Republican candidate. In 2008, as the Obama–McCain election neared, the Pennsylvania Republican state chairman said in a statement:   Between March 23rd and October 1st, various groups, including ACORN, submitted over 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election Board with 57,435 rejected for faulty information. Most of these registrations were submitted by ACORN, and rejected due to fake social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, clearly fraudulent signatures. In July of 2020, this was the headline from the U.S. Department of Justice on a former Pennsylvania Democrat congressman:  Former Congressman Charged With Ballot Stuffing, Bribery, and Obstruction And as that story unfolded, CNN headlined:  Ex-Democratic congressman sentenced to prison in yearslong Pennsylvania election fraud scheme There’s more of a similar nature on the record when it comes to the issue of election integrity in Pennsylvania over the years. There is a history — and not a good one. So, getting back to the upcoming election, Jack Smith now declares that it is a crime to demand election integrity, and for demanding that integrity, Trump has committed a crime. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump has joined the prevaricators, saying that Trump was guilty of “fomenting the riot that unfolded at the Capitol.” Trump did no such thing, urging supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Did a relative handful get out of control and riot? Yes. But the thousands  upon thousands there in Washington that day were completely peaceful.  Were the Trump critics to be taken seriously, history would be rewritten by casting blame on ’60s heroes Dr. Martin Luther King, and Democrat Sens. George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy because the causes they outspokenly supported — civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War — periodically resulted in open violence with riots in places like Newark, Detroit, Washington D.C., and one college campus after another. In fact, so bad was some of the opposition to those causes back then that 1968 GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon won the presidency campaigning on platform of restoring “law and order” to the nation. Make no mistake. The American Left — and the Left internationally — is decidedly authoritarian at its core. In today’s America, Joe Biden and his henchmen have vividly illustrated their authoritarian instincts by using the power of the federal government to literally prosecute and jail the Democrats’ leading political opponent — Trump. They are the stuff of a banana republic. The latest release coming from Jack Smith is nothing if not another look at Smith’s own authoritarianism, and his eager willingness to interfere in the 2024 election to resolve it to his satisfaction. Not good. Not good at all. The post Jack Smith’s Election Interference appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a law banning legacy and donor considerations in admissions at all private colleges and universities in the state. California is the fifth state to do so, following Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia. Newsom praised the law, saying, “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few.” According to the Stanford Daily, 13.6 percent of admits to Stanford University in 2023 were children of alumni or donors. Inside Higher Ed reports that it was 14.4 percent at the University of Southern California in 2022, and 13.3 percent at the University of Santa Clara. Pepperdine University’s is around 9 percent. Last year, 2.5 million students were enrolled in California’s colleges or universities. Even at USC — with the highest percentage of legacy or donor admits — nearly 87 percent of the student population of more than 45,000 were not the children of alumni or donors. This hardly sounds like college in California is available only to “a lucky few.” But whatever. The truth is that giving spots to children of alumni isn’t the big problem with academia. Saving a few seats for relatives of megadonors isn’t the big problem with academia. It isn’t even preferential treatment for athlete applicants that’s the big problem with academia. The problem is tenure. There. I said it. Tenure was originally intended to protect faculty from retaliatory action for pursuing meaningful, if controversial, research. But what it was intended to do and what it’s doing are different things entirely. The scandals and headlines coming out of higher education provide plenty of evidence. Last year’s ugly antisemitic protests, threats, and violence on college campuses shocked the nation. But when three Ivy League presidents from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress and none was willing to condemn calls for violence against Jewish students, that shock turned to outrage. Liz Magill, then-president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned after the congressional hearings. The university’s announcement stated that Magill would “remain a tenured faculty member” at the law school. Claudine Gay, then-president of Harvard University, initially refused to resign — until it was discovered that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation and other research. Gay then stepped down from the presidency. She kept her tenured chaired professorship and her approximately $900,000 annual salary. The standards for publication in the social sciences and humanities have become theater of the absurd. In 2018, scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian exposed this by writing, as the Atlantic described it, “20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions,” including homophobia in dog parks and Hitlerian feminism. A significant number were accepted for publication. Then there’s the serious scholarship that gets condemned by the academic community because it skewers sacred cows. Brown professor Lisa Littman coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 paper; Littman’s research revealed the explosion of self-identification as “transgender” among pre-teen and young teen girls with diagnosed disabilities (like autism) who spent large amounts of time on social media. Littman was viciously attacked as being “transphobic,” and the journal that published her findings was cowed into retracting her paper (which was later republished). A later article by researchers Suzanna Diaz and Michael Bailey that supported Littman’s theories was similarly attacked and forced to be retracted. Critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi was awarded tenure and a chaired professorship at Boston University for promoting a worldview that espouses retaliatory discrimination “to remedy past discrimination.” He has plenty of company on college campuses across the country. And then there are the countless lesser-known tenured faculty members at American colleges and universities who defend Marxism, communism, and socialism, despite a death toll of more than 100 million people, as well as widespread economic devastation, poverty, starvation, government oppression, incarceration, and torture. Those economic and political philosophies should have been condemned to the “dustbin of history” decades ago. But they weren’t. Why? Because tenured faculty keep them alive. In what other profession — besides perhaps government — do you get to espouse catastrophically societally detrimental views and not only remain utterly unaccountable for the consequences but have guaranteed employment from which to do it? It isn’t just the social sciences. The processes associated with obtaining research funding, and those for hiring, promotion, and tenure within universities, enable tenured faculty in the hard sciences to block the research of applicants to doctoral programs, Ph.D. candidates, and untenured faculty members whose work might call into question, contradict, or even disprove that of senior faculty members. This has had profound (and negative) consequences for Alzheimer’s research, as author Sharon Begley explained in her 2019 article in the medial research journal Stat. These same structures have also prevented researchers whose work refutes the prevailing claims about anthropogenic climate change from making their work more visible and well known to the general public. The appalling state of our press is another consequence of bad theories espoused by tenured faculty. Journalism schools used to teach that the profession required the pursuit of truth and holding powerful people accountable. Now a popular approach is that the role of journalists is to manipulate the public into believing what they’re told and behaving the way you want them to. It should not surprise us, therefore, that our media has been working with government to censor truthful speech and characterize it as “misinformation.” And when opponents of those who want to increase their power point to the constitutional prohibitions against those encroachments, here come the “scholars,” prepared to argue that the limitations of presidential power in Articles 1 and 2 are the problem. The Electoral College is the problem. The composition of the United States Senate is the problem. The First Amendment is the problem. The Second Amendment is the problem. The Due Process and Equal Protection clauses are the problem. The Constitution is the problem. Recent polls show declining public confidence in higher education. As more Americans realize that some of the country’s most grievous problems have their origin in academia, enrollment, confidence and donations will continue to dwindle. At least until academia acknowledges the problems and takes steps to address them. Elsewhere in the private sector, employment is not guaranteed. But employees can be protected from retaliation and unlawful or unethical termination of their employment by well-drafted contracts and properly crafted human resources policies and procedures. There’s no reason academic employment cannot operate the same way. To find out more about Laura Hollis and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Now It’s Time to Eliminate Tenure appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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from SGT Report: Biden and Harris have abandoned the American people repeatedly and at every turn. And now there are Americans literally dying for help in Tennessee and North Carolina and FEMA is actively blocking volunteers from helping as corpses begin to rot where entire towns have been wiped out. This is yet more blatant […]