President Joe Biden had a very creepy response to a very important question after he finished his comments on Friday to the press, in the wake of the guilty verdicts leveled against former President Donald Trump. Biden's comments came on the day after the former president and presumptive 2024 GOP...

As President Joe Biden leads the federal government to higher and higher spending, consumer confidence is plummeting amid wave after wave of Bidenflation coming down on all our heads. Despite the often unduly rosy reporting in the establishment media, the Biden economy continues to founder on the rocks of inflation...

Enthusiasm for former President Donald Trump among the populace seems completely unaffected by the ongoing legal issues that Democrats have forced upon him. If anything, there appears to be a trend that each time he is unjustly pursued by Democrats abusing the justice system, more people simply rally behind him....

Police officers put their lives on the line daily, going out on patrol to ensure their community is safe. Unfortunately, some bad actors, bolstered by the establishment media have decided to paint all cops as evil, based on the actions of a few, and have encouraged others to harm the...

According to a new SEC filing by Live Nation Entertainment, a security breach has put untold troves of personal data at risk. Live Nation is the owner of the ubiquitous ticket-selling platform Ticketmaster, and that platform appears to "primarily" be the issue, according to the filing. "On May 20, 2024,...

You’ve likely heard of ghosts and demons, maybe even wish-granting djinns. But how about soul-cleaving dybbuks? These evil spirits are rooted in Jewish folklore and rank high among the most dangerous supernatural beings due to a monstrous propensity for human possession. Fear of the dybbuk reached an all-time high between the 16th and 18th centuries, […] The post 10 Gripping Facts about Dybbuks from Jewish Folklore appeared first on Listverse.

Dating back to the 11th century, Colditz Castle in eastern Germany has had what can justifiably be described as a checkered history. After the outbreak of the Second World War, it took on a new role as a prisoner-of-war camp. The Nazis reckoned that its tall, immensely thick stone walls would rule out any possibility […] The post 10 Fascinating Facts about WWII’s Most Notorious Nazi-Run POW Camp appeared first on Listverse.

Following Hamas’ bloodthirsty Oct. 7 assault on Israel’s southern border communities, woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts on campuses and beyond formed a perplexing alliance. The Left advocates social justice; celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion; and professes special concern for historically oppressed minorities. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Iran-backed jihadists torture and kill based on race, ethnicity, and sexual preference; loathe and wage war against Israelis, Jews, Americans, and the West; and, by all available means, seek to establish Islamist theocracy. What could unite two such seemingly mutually exclusive camps? Not for the first time a common enemy makes allies out of adversaries. A shared disdain for the United States and Israel draws together woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts. Sustaining their cooperation is a common resentment of the principles that the United States and Israel embrace—individual freedom, democratic equality, free-market dynamism, toleration of a diversity of beliefs about faith and human flourishing—and an antipathy to Israel’s character as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The shared disdain and common resentment and antipathy give rise to more puzzles. Some of these concern students. How in the space of only a few years have numerous leftist students moved from trembling in fear and rage at opinions with which they disagree to donning masks and kaffiyehs, occupying prime campus real estate, and siding with terrorism and religious war? How have they gone from insisting that all women must be believed to serving as apologists for Hamas’ raping of Israeli women? How have they set aside the dogmas that speech and even silence are violence in favor of harassing fellow students by openly celebrating the perpetration of mass atrocities and publicly chanting slogans that call for Israel’s destruction? Elite Universities as Ground Zero Other puzzles concern America’s institutions of higher education and those who run them and teach there. How have our elite universities become ground zero of the alliance between leftism and jihad? Where are the responsible educators—administration officials and faculty—who will day in and day out soberly explain the difference between peaceful protests subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, and disruptive demonstrations that impair the university’s mission, which is to acquire and transmit knowledge, enliven the moral imagination, and cultivate independent thought? What steps should be taken to correct course so that instead of inculcating campus orthodoxies that condemn the United States as a uniquely awful regime and that deem dissent from institutionally approved narratives as proof of ignorance or bigotry, our universities foster civility, toleration, curiosity, and intellectual acuity, and teach a reasoned, historically informed understanding of constitutional government in America? In “The Woke Jihad,” Commentary Magazine’s June cover story, Abe Greenwald brings these puzzles into sharper focus with essential background and incisive analysis. His rhetoric occasionally overheats. Then again, the provocation is severe—the routinization of antisemitism and anti-Americanism on campus. And the stakes—the future of our educational institutions and hence the nation’s future—could hardly be higher. A “hybrid enemy of the West,” the alliance between woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts that burst out into the open following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacres, Greenwald reports, “won’t stop soon, as it is well-funded and impressively organized.” Moral impulses that higher education has long incubated, moreover, fuel the partnership. Even after colleges and universities remove the pro-Hamas encampments, the alliance will live on in the hearts and minds of many students, and in those of the professors and administrators who have accommodated or endorsed them. Dear university students in the United States of America, you are standing on the right side of history.— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) May 29, 2024 According to Greenwald, the allies “enjoy a valuable symbiotic relationship.” The woke Left needed a new cause. Three years had passed since protesters, prompted by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, established encampments in many cities. Many were peaceful. Many, though, were not, leaving behind more than a billion dollars of damage. And “with the liberal rank and file no longer interested in police defunding, the public turning against DEI schemes, whistleblowers revealing the horrors of ‘gender-affirming care’ for trans kids, and the term woke a source of liberal embarrassment,” the woke Left found a new calling in coming to Hamas’ defense. Meanwhile, “the jihadists needed the American left for tactical purposes: to propagandize for their cause and fit antisemitic terrorists—alongside gays, the transgendered, and African Americans—into the intersectional Left’s pantheon of victims.” Strange Bedfellows The allies’ feelings toward one another do not match. Woke leftists, Greenwald writes, “love the jihadists … for their ferocity and exoticism, as much as for their bottomless self-pity.” In contrast, fidelity to core beliefs impels the jihadist to experience “disgust for the unchecked females, sexual libertines, heathens, and even Jews he’s been forced to instrumentalize in the cause of Islamist domination.” At the same time, woke leftists—“Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ groups, intersectional feminist organizations, and others”—converge politically with jihad enthusiasts to “salute October 7 as righteous resistance and condemn the Israeli response as genocide.” Both revel in violence and victimhood, maintains Greenwald, and both denounce the West as essentially exploitative, Jews as quintessential exploiters, and Israel as the epitome of Jewish exploitation. The woke Left cloaks its revolutionary aims under appeals to justice that resonate with decent people. If Black Lives Matter focused on saving black lives, asks Greenwald, why would it “have seized on a statistically tiny number of police killings as justification to rid black neighborhoods of police?” If the trans movement was principally concerned with equality, why would it lavish energy on “denying solid biological reality, throwing kids into emotional disarray, scaring the hell out of parents, endorsing ruinous medical procedures for minors, and trolling everyone who’s not convinced?” Rhetoric Doesn’t Match Reality And if diversity, equity, and inclusion aimed to overcome differences and bring people together, why do DEI programs intensify animosity, not least by classifying all white people and all Jewish people as oppressors? Rather than pursuing equality under law, the woke Left endeavors to replace American principles and remake the nation’s norms and institutions. Similarly, the pro-Palestinian campaign on campus does not serve Palestinians’ reasonable interests. If it did, it would not support Hamas, whose theocratic dictatorship deliberately uses noncombatant Palestinians as human shields; employs Palestinian homes, schools, and mosques as military facilities; and steals humanitarian supplies meant for noncombatants. All this the jihad enthusiasts overlook. Instead, they concentrate on turning worldwide public opinion against, and spurring the imposition of economic and legal sanctions on, the Jewish state. By damaging Israel, which they regard as an outpost of Western imperialism in the Middle East, they strive to weaken and fundamentally transform the United States. Several revenue streams fund the anti-Israel and anti-American lawlessness besetting American campuses. One stream, according to Greenwald, flows from pro-Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) groups like American Muslims for Palestine, the principal backer of Students for Justice in Palestine. Another, he reports, comes from left-wing philanthropies, including the Tides Foundation, the Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Susan and Nick Pritzker. Hamas patron Qatar provides a third major source of financial backing, giving “$4.7 billion to multiple American colleges and universities between 2001 and 2021.” The money is effective not only because of its quantity. In addition, elite universities have for decades tilled the intellectual soil out of which the woke jihad has arisen. Observes Greenwald: Dominant academic trends such as intersectionality, critical race theory, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism have turned millions of young minds into a moral funhouse mirror in which racists are reflected back as angels, colorblindness as racism, one sex as the other, democracy as tyranny, tyranny as paradise, freedom as bondage, refugees as colonialists, Jews as white oppressors, and terrorists as saints. Joining Forces, Blending Pathologies Greenwald, nevertheless, finds hope amid the bleakness. “In joining forces, the woke and the Islamists may have compounded their resources, but they’ve also compounded the disgust that the public already harbored for each group individually,” he writes. “The spectacle of their blended pathologies will be, and already is, their discrediting and their undoing. Not ours.” Woke jihad’s self-discrediting and undoing, however, are not enough. The university culture that has fostered woke-leftism and jihad enthusiasm has staying power. Responsible remedies to the debasement of liberal education are not likely to originate with or receive vigorous endorsement from members of the faculty and administration. A large majority of them have either encouraged—or stood by in silence during—higher education’s long descent into obscurantism and sectarianism. Finally taking notice of the pathologies plaguing higher education, some wealthy donors have begun to suspend donations. But universities will not implement reforms of lasting significance until trustees and governing boards hire, and back fully, university presidents who understand, and realign their universities with, liberal education’s structure, content, and purpose. Reform-minded presidents by themselves can’t fix universities. They must find fellow reformers, few and far between though they may be, among today’s professors and administrators. These colleagues will be throwbacks, eccentrics, and dissenters. Some will be brash, others soft-spoken. To accomplish the task, they must, while respecting partisan political differences, join forces to defend the equal liberty for all on which the American constitutional order rests and to rebuild the liberal education that secures freedom and democracy. Originally published at RealClearPolitics.com The post The Sick, Sociopathic Symbiosis of the Woke Left and Jihadi Enthusiasts appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans struggling to save for retirement today, get ready for more struggle, at least if President Joe Biden gets his way. He’s proposing a tax hike on savings that would mean a negative rate of return for many people after adjusting for inflation. As part of his trillions of dollars in tax hikes, Biden has proposed a 45% tax on capital gains, painting it as a tax on the boogeyman of “greedy” billionaires. In reality, 12.5 million Americans—mostly middle class—pay this tax on their retirement savings. That’s why every American should be horrified that Biden wants to raise this tax to the highest rate in 111 years. Such a move would severely hamper people’s ability to save for retirement, and it would cripple economic growth. This is especially true in the high-inflation environment created by Bidenomics. The declining value of the dollar is critical when planning for retirement since it means you need to be prepared to pay much more in the future as the cost of living climbs ever higher. That forces people to put their savings into investments with higher rates of return, a phenomenon known as chasing yield. If someone buys a bond with a 3% yield, but inflation is 4%, then the person’s real (inflation-adjusted) return is negative because the larger number of dollars lost so much purchasing power. Of course, even if you lost money in real terms, you still have to pay capital gains tax on the paper gain. A 45% tax leaves our 3% bondholder with a 1.65% nominal return on investment, but a real return of negative 2.35%. The one-two punch of inflation and capital gains means saving is for suckers. The result of such punitive taxes is people will save less, meaning they will invest less, which takes away the key driver of economic growth. Investment is where an economy gets capital resources, which allow for increases in productivity and higher wages, advances in medicine and other technological breakthroughs, and a higher standard of living. Progress in all those grinds to a halt when investment is choked off by tax hikes. The pie stops growing. Throttle investment enough and people’s quality of life will even retrograde. If massive tax hikes on investment are so detrimental to individuals and the economy at large alike, why would Biden propose such a disastrous policy? In short, because he and the rest of Washington, D.C., are addicted to spending. Just a few weeks ago, the White House proposed a gargantuan federal budget of $7.3 trillion—a level not even reached during the COVID-19 pandemic—along with $4.9 trillion in future tax hikes. Our Heritage Foundation colleague Richard Stern has calculated that this translates into $36,000 of additional taxes per family in America. These taxes will be paid through lower spending and reduced savings as families cut back on things like retirement contributions so they can afford necessities like food, rent, or transportation costs. Much of the White House’s proposed tax increases on investment will be hidden from view, but will nonetheless hamper your attempts to save and eventually retire. Biden’s proposed higher corporate income tax will be passed on, of course. Customers will pay higher prices, workers will receive lower wages, and investors (savers) will see lower rates of return. That means you’ll pay higher prices without seeing commensurate increases in your earnings, leaving you with less money at the end of the month to save. To add insult to injury, what you’re able to put into a retirement account will grow slower. This may sound terribly unfair, but it’s simple mathematics. Someone must pay for trillions of dollars in government spending. The rich hire good accountants while the poor don’t pay taxes, so it’s going to be the American middle class who pays. Whether it’s capital gains tax, corporate income tax, or the hidden tax of inflation, the government will get its pound of flesh—or, in this case, 7.3 trillion pounds. Biden is turning the American dream of retirement into a nightmare. Originally published by Fox Business The post Biden Turns American Dream of Retirement Into a Nightmare appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office provided free consultations and legal assistance to illegal aliens charged with violent felonies in 2023, documents reveal. The taxpayer-funded consultations were provided to migrants charged with various heinous crimes—including rape, robbery, strangulation, aggravated assault, and homicide by vehicle—in an ostensible effort to help them avoid convictions that would lead to their deportation, documents obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute reveal. Krasner created the position of immigration counsel in 2018 to provide consultations and work on cases involving illegal aliens. “He is directly contradicting the purpose of a district attorney—to prosecute crimes—and using his office to help immigration violators evade the law,” Dale Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, said of Krasner. “The last thing the city needs is to keep criminal aliens there who may have earned deportation.” The Immigration Reform Law Institute outlined issues with the case list and questioned the objectives of the immigration counsel position in an investigative report published Thursday. Krasner first won election as Philadelphia’s district attorney in 2017, after left-wing billionaire George Soros dropped well over $1 million to fund a super PAC to support him in the Democratic primary. Like all Soros-backed prosecutors, Krasner ran on a left-wing approach to criminal justice, which calls for ending mass incarceration and shielding illegal aliens from deportation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This position in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office focuses on obtaining “immigration-neutral” outcomes for defendants facing prosecution, according to its website. In practice, reaching “immigration-neutral” outcomes typically means the immigration counsel works with prosecutors on lowering charges against non-citizens accused of various crimes—defendants who are illegal immigrants are not excluded from possible consultation, according to the office and past reports. A foreign national charged with rape, for example, would likely face “immigration consequences,” i.e. apprehension and deportation by federal immigration authorities, upon completion of local criminal proceedings. “I look at every case where the defendant has been identified as an immigrant to see if there’s an immigration-neutral outcome that is just,” Immigration Counsel Caleb Arnold said. “Sometimes that means creating an outcome that doesn’t have any immigration consequences, or minimized immigration consequences.” At the outset of Arnold’s position, Krasner’s office repeatedly suggested the immigration counsel would not provide assistance to foreign nationals accused of high-level offenses such as homicide and sex crimes. Krasner said in a 2018 press release that the immigration counsel would focus on cases involving “low-level offenders who pose no threat to public safety” and that same day said the counsel would work on “cases that are not that serious but have very serious immigration consequences.” However, a case list of defendants who consulted with the immigration counsel reveals that the district attorney’s office is helping potentially dangerous noncitizens avoid deportation. The institute filed a records request with the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, asking for a list of “defendants Immigration Counsel Caleb Arnold has consulted with, or otherwise worked on, over the 2023 calendar year.” The list that was handed over, redacting names and case numbers, showed the following: 29 DUI cases; 21 aggravated assault, domestic violence, and other cases involving crimes of violence; 26 cases of possession of drugs with intent to distribute; 12 firearm cases; nine cases of rape and indecent assault and sexual assault on a child; nine robbery or burglary cases; and one vehicular homicide case. The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained the 2023 case list and confirmed the breakdown of charges. It was not immediately clear whether the defendants charged with the most serious crimes were able to get their charges pleaded down or faced arrest by federal immigration authorities. Krasner’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In its investigative report, the Immigration Reform Law Institute noted that the case list not only contradicts past claims by Krasner’s office but gives special privileges to foreign nationals not afforded to U.S. citizens. “However, prosecutors’ offices rarely, if ever, take special steps to minimize these consequences when defendants are U.S. citizens,” the report states. “And we are unaware of any DA’s offices that employ special attorneys solely to insulate citizen criminal defendants from the effects of their criminal behavior.” “It is utterly shocking that any DA’s office in the United States would pursue these kinds of irresponsible policies,” said Matt O’Brien, director of investigation at the institute. “Essentially, DA Krasner is rewarding foreign nationals for committing crimes in the United States.” “And he is doing so at the expense of the city he is sworn to protect,” O’Brien said. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Soros-Backed DA’s Office Gave Free Consultations to Illegal Aliens Charged With Violent Crimes appeared first on The Daily Signal.