Home Blog Page 3328

Canceling Thomas Jefferson

After more than a century, the New York City Council is removing a statue of Thomas Jefferson from its chamber. The decision, which was made by the New York City Public Design Commission, was unanimous.

It was wrong, too.

Justifying the move, Councilperson Adrienne Adams proposed that Jefferson had to go because he “embodied some of the most shameful parts of our country’s long and nuanced history.” But, ironically enough, it is precisely “nuanced history” that is missing from this analysis. Like many people, Jefferson could, indeed, be hypocritical and self-contradictory. Like many people from his region, he did, indeed, own slaves (and, unlike George Washington, he did not free them upon his death). And, like many people of his generation, he possessed some unpleasant private views. But it is not for any of that that we celebrate him. We celebrate him because he authored the Declaration of Independence — a magisterial document, which, both at home and abroad, has served as a beacon of hope and liberty throughout that “long” history to which Adrienne Adams refers.

This matters, for, as Princeton’s Sean Wilentz told the commission in a letter, the statue in question “specifically honors Jefferson for” his role in penning the Declaration, which Wilentz describes as “his greatest contribution to America, indeed, to humankind.” Jefferson deserves to be honored for that contribution, which has served, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, as “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” as “the definitions and axioms of free society,” and as “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” It is no accident that the most pernicious expositor of the pro-slavery cause, Alexander Stephens, loathed Thomas Jefferson and was keen to cast the Confederacy as having been founded upon “exactly the opposite idea” to those “entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution.”

Or, to put it another way: What was remarkable about Jefferson was not what he had in common with his contemporaries around the world, but what he did not. Taken in full, his is indeed a “nuanced” legacy, and yet there is no getting past the fact that among the achievements of his long public career were the elimination of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States; the creation of a free Midwest, which flowed from his proposal in 1784 to ban slavery in all the territories west of the Appalachians; and the provision of the moral ammunition that a later generation would use to stamp out slavery on the theory that “all men are created equal.”

To paraphrase John Adams, a free republic will be one of ideas, not of men. In this case, though, it is extremely difficult to separate them. Thomas Jefferson has stood at the New York City Council since 1915 not as a memorial to the Democratic-Republican party, or to Virginia, or to his two-term presidency, but as a tribute to the remarkable, world-changing ideas that he laid out in July of 1776. Those who have orchestrated his unceremonious removal ought to be careful, lest, in a fit of Jacobin pique, they tear down his self-evident truths into the bargain.

Shares Of SPAC Behind Trump Social Media Company Jump 400%

The share price of a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that plans to merge with a media group connected to former President Donald Trump quintupled on Thursday, following an announcement late Wednesday night that Trump planned to launch a new social media company.

  • Shares of the Digital World Acquisition SPAC were trading at $49.81 early Thursday afternoon—more than 400% higher than the price on Wednesday.
  • Trading was halted at five points on Thursday due to volatility, leading to surges in price each time trading resumed.
  • The price of the stock more than doubled over a period of under two hours late Thursday morning into the early afternoon.
  • Digital World Acquisition Corp. was the Fidelity platform’s most actively traded stock on Thursday, with “buy” orders outnumbering “sell” orders nearly three to one.

KEY BACKGROUND

Digital World Acquisition plans to merge with the Trump Media and Technology Group to fund the launch of a new social media platform called “TRUTH Social,” which bills itself as a “rival to the liberal media consortium.” The merger will result in the Trump Media and Technology Group becoming a publicly listed company, according to a statement announcing the move, with Trump serving as chairman. Trump—who was a constant presence on Twitter for most of his presidency—was banned from essentially every major social media platform after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

TRUTH Social is planning a beta launch for invited guests starting in November, ahead of a full release in the first quarter of 2022. Trump Media and Technology Group also announced it plans to launch a video streaming service featuring “non-woke” programming.

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silences,” Trump said on Wednesday. “I’m excited to soon begin sharing my thoughts on TRUTH Social and to fight back against Big Tech.”

GOP Senators Block Democrat Election Overhaul Bill

Tension between the two major parties appears to heat up after the Democrat-backed election bill was blocked in the Senate. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris spoke to the press about GOP senator’s unanimous vote against the so-called Freedom to Vote Act, which aims to federalize U.S. elections. She expressed her frustrations.

On the other hand, GOP senators like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued the bill would erode the integrity of U.S. elections.

“The Senate is designed to stop bad ideas and purely partisan proposals, while helping truly necessary and bipartisan bills become law,” he noted. “As we have shown in the recent past, the Senate is fully capable of making law in this area when actual issues need actual solutions and actual bipartisan works occurs. By contrast, there is nothing necessary or bipartisan about this naked power grab, so it will continue to go nowhere.”

The bill aims to require same-day registration at all polling locations by 2024 and expand early voting as well as force every state to implement drop boxes for the deposit of mail-in ballots, which is currently only authorized in 13 states.

Democrats are calling the bill a compromise after their last sweeping election bill, H.R.1, failed to gain enough support from both sides of the aisle. However, according to McConnell, the only compromise that exists in the so-called Freedom to Vote Act is how much power the left and far-left agreed to grab.

“This latest bill still subjects popular, common sense state election integrity protections like voter ID to the whims of federal bureaucrats,” he stated.

The Kentucky lawmaker went on to add, the point of implementing national election laws is to fix serious problems with voting systems like back in 2002 when senators addressed purported voting irregularities with the Help America Vote Act.

“We did that when there was an actual problem that needed solving in an actual bipartisan process,” said McConnell. “But as long as Senate Democrats remain fixated on their radical agenda, this body will continue to do the job the framers assigned it and stop terrible ideas in their tracks.”

Regarding the so-called Freedom to Vote Act, it’s not expected to advance any further. However, Harris warned this loss will not deter Democrats from their efforts to nationalize U.S. elections.

Ron DeSantis Calls Special Session to Take Legislative Action Against Vaccine Mandates

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday announced he is calling the Florida Legislature back for a special session to address intrusive vaccine mandates and create protections for Floridians who risk losing their jobs. He stressed an individual’s right to earn a living “should not be contingent upon COVID shots.”

“Were to announce we need to take action to protect Florida jobs,” DeSantis said during a press conference in Pinellas County.

“We have a situation now unfortunately in our country where we have a federal government that is very much trying to use the heavy hand of government to force a lot of these injections,” he said, emphasizing his administration’s fundamental belief that people should have basic medical freedom and individual choice. Ultimately, an individual’s “right to earn a living should not be contingent upon COVID shots,” he said.

“And so that’s what we need,” the governor said to applause.

DeSantis noted that the state worked hard to provide vaccines to the elderly and those who wanted them but said they made it clear “from day one” they would make them available for all but mandate the shots for none.

But now, particularly with the Biden administration’s forthcoming OSHA rule, jobs remain in jeopardy, although DeSantis said the administration will contest the rule.

“There are also mandates that potentially could have devastating effects on the state of Florida. One is a federal contractor mandate” which is “putting thousands and thousands of jobs in jeopardy,” he said, noting there are a lot of contractors in Florida, particularly in space and defense.

Those workers are facing getting “kicked to the curb.” Meanwhile,  companies “are in a situation where if they don’t comply, then they would lose out on getting any contracts which is the basic way they do businesses, and so it’s a really really bad situation,” DeSantis said.

“So the attorney general and I, we are working now, we want to contest that contractor mandate in court as well,” he said, adding that his administration will also contest the mandate imposed on hospitals through CMS, where they lose Medicaid and Medicare funding if they fail to comply.

“Well, none of these healthcare providers would be able to function, particularly in a state like Florida where most of their patients are on Medicare, so we think that’s illegal, that’s wrong, and we’re going to be doing that as well,” he said.

However, DeSantis explained it is “not just limited to that,” as some businesses and local governments are violating “what is decent” even though his administration has made it clear individuals cannot be fired based on vaccine choices.

“They’re doing it,” he said, noting that many employers are not honoring the exemptions, either. Because of that, he is calling the legislature back for a special session to address these mounting issues.

“So what we’re going to be doing in addition to mounting aggressive legal challenge to federal mandates, we’re also going to be taking legislative action to add protection to the people of the state of Florida, and that’s something that cannot wait until the regular legislative session next year,” he said, emphasizing that it “needs to happen soon.”

“We will be calling the legislature back for a special session,” he said to cheers. “We want to make sure that individuals in Florida have their livelihoods and their jobs protected and I think this is something — when we were doing the last legislative session, it would have never occurred to me that we would be in the situation that we are with some of the insanity that’s reigning down right now.”

“We took very strong action against things like vaccine passports. That was the right decision to do because we don’t want people to have their freedom circumscribed based on showing papers, and we really nipped that whole issue in the bud here in Florida,” he said.

But now, people and businesses face these “aggressive” potential mandates, and “we need to provide protections,” the governor added.

US Has ‘Lost Operational Control’ of Southwest Border, Senate GOP Panel Told

Federal officials “have lost complete control” of the southwest border under President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, three former high-ranking immigration enforcement officials told a panel of Republican senators Wednesday.

“We have lost complete control of the border. I’ve talked to several Border Patrol chiefs who tell me they have lost operational control of the border under this President,” former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Thomas Holman told three Republican senators during a roundtable discussion of the situation on the U.S. border with Mexico.

“They’ve also lost respect for the Commander-in-Chief and in the [DHS] Secretary,” Holman told senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Rob Portman of Ohio and Rick Scott of Florida.

Johnson said in his opening statement that he convened the roundtable discussion after Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, refused to convene a hearing on the border crisis.

A committee spokesman for Peters did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on Johnson’s claim about Peters refusing to convene an official hearing. Johnson preceded Peters as chairman prior to Democrats’ gaining control in the 2020 election.

Holman’s intense criticism of Biden and Mayorkas were affirmed by Mark Morgan, former Chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under President Barack Obama, and Rodney Scott, who served in the same position under both Biden and his predecessor, President Donald Trump.

Morgan told the senators that “what happens at the Southwest Border does not stay at the Southwest Border. Every town, city, and state in this country is a border town, city, and state. If you have a drug overdose from fentanyl, take it to the bank that the fentanyl came from the southwest border.”

Morgan said “almost every day I get up, as an American, angry. Why? Because I know because I’ve been there, this administration is way beyond not being transparent. They are lying to the American people.”

With “400,000 ‘gotaways’ this fiscal year, 1.9 million total enforcement encounters, an all-time record high, so if the secretary were sitting in front of me right now, I would say ‘Mr. Secretary, stop lying to the American people,’” Morgan added.

Morgan was referring to Mayorkas’ comment to a House committee in September that “the border is secure. We’re executing our plan,” and that the border today “is no less secure than it was” under Trump. “Gotaways” are illegal immigrants who come into the United States without being apprehended by U.S. law enforcement officials.

A White House Press Office official did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for a response to Morgan’s comment.

Scott, the former Border Patrol Chief, said he agreed to appear before the panel because he wanted “to bring attention to the irresponsible and reckless policies that are being implemented by the current administration on the border despite being advised otherwise by professional border security personnel that have been involved in this for decades.”

The immigration aspect of the issues involved in border security are only one area of a broader scope of issues that involve national security, he said.

“It’s just like your home, it’s exactly like your home. If we don’t know and can’t control who and what is in our home, we have no security. If we don’t who and what are in our country, then we have no homeland security,” Scott said.

“When I left as [Border Patrol] Chief, there were 15o nationalities mixed in, it’s not just the Haitians you hear people talking about, or just the South Americans, it’s 150 different nations, many of which are directly involved in or ignoring terrorism threats,” he continued.

The Biden transition team was briefed “by border security professionals … that if they rescinded the common-sense policies that were put in place recently, if they stopped building the border wall, we all predicted that there would be a mass migration,” Scott said.

The roundtable also heard testimony from two mothers, one of whom lost a daughter to fentanyl and the other who lost a son in a traffic accident caused by an illegal alien driving without a license.

Virginia Krieger of Cleveland, Ohio, president of the Fentanyl Awareness Coalition, told the senators that her then-27-year-old daughter, Tiffany, died in 2015 as a result of ingesting what she thought was a Percocet capsule but which in fact was a highly toxic dose of fentanyl.“Tiffany didn’t seek to use fentanyl.

Tiffany didn’t really have any issues at all before that day,” Krieger said. “And now we have an entirely new population of young people dying, being affected by the fentanyl crisis that we have never before seen in this country. And they are the non-addicted victims.

”Krieger said young people “are getting counterfeit pills, either given to them by a friend or being purchased from an online platform like Snap-Chat that make these pills available to anyone with a smartphone, including children as young as 12.

”Mexican drug cartels smuggle billions of dollars worth of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, into the United States every year, with 95 percent of it coming across the southwest border, according to Morgan.

Similarly, Sabine Durden-Coulter of Riverside, California, said her son, Dominque, was on his way to work as a 911 communications officer when he was killed in 2012.

“He was killed by an illegal alien, repeat offender, felon with armed robbery convictions, no driver’s license and two DUIs he received that he received probation for,” Durden-Coulter told the panel.

“The man made a deal with the judge and was charged with vehicle manslaughter without gross negligence and received nine months, with five years probation. And he served 35 days,” she said.

“If the immigration laws that were on the books would have been upheld the first time they had him, the second time, the third time, I wouldn’t be here and my son would still be enjoying his beautiful life and thousands of other families like mine wouldn’t know this grief and pain.”

AG Garland’s Wife Connected to Voting Machine Vendor ES&S

Attorney General (AG) Merrick Garland should recuse himself.  He never should have taken on the AG position because he knew he had too many conflicts of interest that would disqualify him from performing his job without bias.  We’ve already seen his bias in play.

We reported that the AG’s son is making millions pushing the Critical Race Theory (CRT), the same theory that parents around the country are up in arms about.  AG Garland threatened those parents.

Then we uncovered that AG Garland’s wife has close ties to far-left entities like the Brennan Center which are attempting to prevent the 2020 Election audits.

We know that AG Garland’s wife was in the top-secret defense industry with a company called “E-Systems” before she went into the election industry.

Today we can report that along with aligning herself with far-left ‘non-profits’ that Ms. Garland also is connected with election voting machine company, Election Systems and Software (ES&S),  at an event in Rhode Island in 2019.  (We don’t know if she was paid by ES&S or employed by them or not.)

But it gets worse.  The above document showing Ms. Garland’s connection with ES&S was found in support documents for Biden’s choice for Circuit Court Judge, Myrna Perez.  Both Garland and Perez are members of the Election Verification Network.

Ms. Perez is an extreme partisan advocate, and wrote a biased article about elections:

Myrna Pérez had to deal with a wild card ahead of her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday to be a federal appeals court judge, when an article she wrote in May as a voting rights advocate was published with a headline that a top Republican called “an insult to half of this committee.”

Pérez told the committee she didn’t write the Sojourners headline, “The GOP Campaign to Make Elections Less Free.” She didn’t approve it before the article was posted Tuesday. And she didn’t mention political parties in the article.

Ms. Perez also worked for the Brennan Center for Justice. National Review had this to say about Perez and the Brennan Center:

The Brennan Center is not required to disclose its donors. It has extensive ties to other liberal dark-money groups, in addition to being one itself. Its largest source of funding has been George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, with millions more coming from the Tides Foundation. It claims to be nonpartisan while embracing a distinctly left-wing agenda.”

“A major focus of the organization has been advocating for less freedom of speech in connection with elections while simultaneously attacking the most basic measures to ensure the integrity of elections. That includes any and all voter-ID measures, as well as efforts to update voter rolls. As director of the center’s Voting Rights and Election Program, Pérez has been at the forefront of the Brennan Center’s efforts in this regard.”

“Pérez is one of the most blatant examples we have seen of Biden’s dark-money payback scheme, the nomination of judges who he knows will deliver via the courts the policy outcomes that the Left desires. She is not the only Brennan Center alumna to be nominated to a circuit judgeship. In July, President Biden nominated Jennifer Sung, who spent two years as a Skadden Fellow at the Brennan Center, to the Ninth Circuit.”

AG Garland’s family is right in the middle of the 2020 Election steal and the CRT push to innocent children in this country.  He has no business leading the Justice Department and if he was a man of integrity he would recuse himself from his position today.

Hunter Biden Reportedly Offered US Company $80,000-Worth of Info on Russian Businessman Deripaska

Just over a year ago The New York Post offered its series of exposés on Hunter Biden, son of the current US President, with damning emails obtained from his purportedly abandoned laptop shedding light on “pay-to-play” schemes involving then-Vice President Joe Biden.

Hunter Biden once offered to sell intelligence pertaining to Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, founder of Rusal, the second-largest aluminium company in the world, to a major US company for a sizeable fee, reported a columnist for The New York Post.

The Russian billionaire has been under Washington-imposed sanctions since 2018 over purported close ties to the Kremlin amid allegations of Russia’s role in the US presidential elections in 2016.

Deripaska, who on Wednesday condemned FBI raids of homes of his relatives in the United States, remains on the American sanctions list despite the fact that a number of his companies were subsequently relieved of sanctions in exchange for the billionaire ceding direct control over the assets.

FBI agents carry items as an agent stands watch during the U.S. law enforcement agency’s raid at Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s home in Washington, U.S., October 19, 2021.
© REUTERS / TOM BRENNER

The son of the current US President had put forward the proposal to US aluminium firm Alcoa from his own company Rosemont Seneca in 2011, according to emails contained on Hunter Biden’s purported laptop and cited by Post reporter Miranda Devine, who has written a book “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide”, which is slated to come out on 30 November.

Oleg Deripaska
© Sputnik / Alexey Filippov

Alcoa was to be provided with “statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska (OD), Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL,” state documents on the so-called “laptop from Hell”, believed to have been abandoned by Hunter Biden at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.

An email addressed to Daniel Cruise, Alcoa’s then-Vice President of Government and Public Affairs, dated 3 June 2011, and cited by the outlet, reads:

“Please see the attached proposal per our last conversation . . . we tried to provide a little better sense of the product by attaching some of the raw data that is produced through the elite mapping procedure.” 

The proposal is said to have pertained to a “list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of OD’s [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries.” Alcoa was to be charged “$25,000 for phase one of the project [and] $55,000 for refined analysis,” says the report. Another email, dated 8 June 2011 and forwarded to Hunter Biden, showed Pei Cheng, at Alcoa, writing to Cruise: 

“I don’t believe the data analysis is worth the full $55,000. I think the most valuable piece for us would be the list of Russian elites connected to OD [Deripaska] that would not otherwise be on Government Affairs team’s radar, including various Russian Committee Heads, Union leaders or Ministers.” 

Separate mention was made in the email of the fact that “Rosemont Seneca [has] Co-chairmen: Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, and Christopher Heinz . . . stepson of Sen. John Kerry.”

At the time of the cited proposals, Alcoa had signed a two-year metal supply agreement with Russia’s RUSAL. In an email on 10 June 2011 to Hunter Biden, his business associate Eric Schwerin wrote that Rosemont Seneca offered Alcoa a price tag of $25,000 for information about Deripaska. 

“Not horrible feedback… Daniel’s guy [sic] missed the point that the price was $25k reduced from $55k,” stated the email.

In response to the report in the Post, a spokesman for Alcoa Corporation, a spinoff of Alcoa Inc., said they were “not in a position to respond on behalf of our prior parent company.”

Rusal
© Sputnik / Evgenia Novozhenina
 

This comes as slightly over a year has passed since The New York Post published an exposé on the alleged unethical and potentially illegal influence peddling involving his father, then-Vice-President Joe Biden.

The damning emails were taken from a laptop supposedly abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware repair shop. The documents suggested that then-Vice President Biden met Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive from the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, less than a year before Ukraine’s then-General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired at the US VP’s request.

Then Vice President Joe Biden, left, and his son Hunter Biden appear at the Duke Georgetown NCAA college basketball game in Washington on Jan. 30, 2010.
© AP Photo / Nick Wass

Another batch of emails weighed in on an unspecified business venture with a Chinese firm and allocation of “20 [percent] for H[unter]” and “10 percent” for “the big guy,” with Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski telling media that the “big guy” referred to Joe Biden.

Hunter Biden is also currently facing a probe into his taxes by the Justice Department, launched as far back as 2018 and connected to suspicious foreign transactions, including possible exchanges of money with “China and other foreign nations.”

 Amid the bombshell revelations that erupted in late 2020, Democratic-aligned US media have largely ignored the allegations targeting Hunter Biden and his father. In an op-ed on 12 October The Post’s editorial board underscored that although “the media have (mostly) stopped pretending we got anything wrong, most outlets still don’t even mention these revelations”. Nevertheless, the media outlet vowed to keep asking questions about the Bidens’ alleged “pay-to-play” schemes to ensure that they would not be “allowed to get away with it again.”

‘Gotta Be a New Record’: Joe Biden Appears to Say He Rode Amtrak as VP For 36 Years

Gaffe-prone US President Joe Biden raised some eyebrows as he touted his ‘Build Back Better’ plan on Wednesday in his native hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Joe Biden is no stranger to delivering “word salad” when speaking publicly, and his Wednesday attempt to garner public support for his domestic agenda – the Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill – fed into the increasing pattern of awkwardness accompanying his speeches.

The Build Back Better bill focused on a long list of social policies and programs, ranging from education and healthcare to housing to climate, has been mired in GOP opposition and Democratic Party infighting over the vast scale of proposed government spending. As the US President touted his sweeping package, in which he promised to invest in Pennsylvania’s roads, bridges and public transportation, he appeared to say he commuted on Amtrak for 36 years as vice president.

Biden, speaking in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, said:

“I commuted [on Amtrak] every single day for 36 years as vice president of the United States after my wife and daughter were killed, I went home to see my family, never stopped.”

Joe Biden, 78, served as President Barack Obama’s vice president from 2009 to 2017. Biden is known to have used the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, or Amtrak, passenger service between Washington and his home in Wilmington, Delaware, during his time in the Senate and White House as vice president.

The current POTUS’s first wife and their infant daughter Naomi died in a car crash in 1972, when Biden was senator-elect in Delaware. As often is the case with Joe Biden’s gaffes and blunders peppering his speeches, the statement became the butt of jokes among netizens.

With Joe Biden increasingly known for his bizarre remarks, Press Secretary Jen Psaki earlier said that the White House communications team “a lot of times” instructs the president not to take questions.

Furthermore, some White House staffers appear to mute or turn off their TVs when the President is delivering remarks, according to a Politico report earlier in October. Staffers are reportedly driven by concerns he may undermine the White House’s “carefully orchestrated messaging”.

Florida’s DeSantis Calls For Ban On Employer Vaccine Mandate

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday he will call a special session of the Florida legislature to vote on banning private companies from enacting vaccine mandates, as part of a plan to take even stronger action against public Covid restrictions, in a state already known for its aggressive stance.

  • DeSantis issued a “vaccine passport” ban by executive order in April, which prohibits businesses from requiring customers to show proof of Covid vaccination, but it’s unclear whether the order also prohibits vaccine mandates for workers.
  • The governor said he hopes to hold the special session in November, but Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls (R) said in a memorandum after DeSantis’ news conference on Thursday that he hasn’t received any dates for the proposed session.
  • DeSantis also said he wants lawmakers to strengthen the Parents Bill of Rights—a law that largely prohibits mandatory Covid restrictions in schools—by adding a provision that assures parents can collect attorney’s fees if they win a case against a school district over illegal Covid restrictions.

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“If anyone has been forced to do an injection and has an adverse reaction, that business should be liable,” DeSantis said.

KEY BACKGROUND

The special session call from DeSantis comes just days after a similar GOP-led endeavor failed in Texas. The state Senate there ultimately did not vote on a vaccine mandate ban after it became clear it did not have enough support to pass the chamber, after more than two dozen business groups lobbied against it, saying it amounted to too much government regulation. A ban in Florida would follow numerous other actions the state has taken to cut down on Covid restrictions, which have primarily come by executive order from DeSantis. Public mask mandates have long been prohibited in Florida, which lifted capacity restrictions on most businesses last year months before any other large state. The mask mandate ban in schools has led to legal battles between the DeSantis administration and a handful of school districts in Democratic-leaning parts of the state. The Florida Department of Education has responded by pulling state funding from districts that decide to keep mandates, in violation of state orders.

How ‘Diversity’ Turned Tyrannical

What began as an effort to hire more minorities has turned into a demand for ideological engagement.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was supposed to host Thursday’s John Carlson Lecture on climate. MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences canceled the event because the speaker turned out to have expressed a dissenting opinion—though not about climate science. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot argued in a Newsweek piece that universities’ obsession with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, “threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.” If MIT wanted to prove Mr. Abbot’s point, it could hardly have done better. (His lecture will be hosted instead by Princeton’s conservative redoubt, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.)

DEI efforts have been under way for decades, but recently they have come to dominate teaching and research agendas, including in the hard sciences. Many scientific disciplines, including my own area of physics, had too few women and minorities in the 1970s and ’80s. Newly established diversity offices developed procedures to counter the possibility that underlying issues might interfere with ensuring both excellence and diversity. As chairman of a physics department in the 1990s, I had to write a statement justifying each appointment we made that went to a white man.

Once entrenched, the DEI offices began to grow unchecked. They became huge and expensive offices not subject to faculty oversight and now work to impose “equity” not only by discriminating in favor of female and minority candidates but by demanding and enforcing ideological commitments from new faculty.

Traditionally, applicants for a science faculty position submit published articles, recommendations from mentors and colleagues, and a statement of their proposed research and teaching interests. University selection committees use this information to assess their qualifications for research and teaching.

Several years ago, one began to see an additional criterion in advertisements for faculty openings. As a recent Cornell ad puts it: “Also required is a statement of diversity, equity and inclusion describing the applicant’s efforts and aspirations to promote equity, inclusion and diversity through teaching, research and service.” This sort of requirement became more common and is now virtually ubiquitous. Of the 25 most recent advertisements for junior faculty that appeared in Physics Today online listings as of Oct. 15—from research institutions like Caltech to liberal-arts colleges like Bryn Mawr, and even in areas as esoteric as quantum engineering and theoretical astrophysics—24 require applicants to demonstrate an explicit, active commitment to the DEI agenda.

This isn’t merely pro forma; it’s a real barrier to employment. The life-sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley reports that it rejected 76% of applicants in 2018-19 based on their diversity statements without looking at their research records. A colleague at a major research institution, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her students, wrote to me: “I have a student on the market this year, agonizing more on the diversity statement than on the research proposal. He even took training where they taught them how to write one. It breaks my heart to see this.” Other colleagues relate that their white male postdocs aren’t getting interviews or have chosen to seek jobs outside academia.

This is happening not only in universities. Last week the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a biomedical research charity, announced a $2.2 billion initiative aimed at reducing racial disparity, made possible by a contraction in its funding of significant research for senior investigators. The initiative includes $1.2 billion in grants for early-career researchers. Science magazine reports that because antidiscrimination law prohibits disqualifying applicants on the basis of race and sex, the recipients will be chosen based on their “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in the words of the institute’s president, Erin O’Shea. How? “Diversity statements,” she says, are “a very promising approach.”

The DEI monomania has contributed to the crisis of free speech on campus. As Mr. Abbot’s cancellation illustrates, even tenured senior faculty aren’t immune. Stephen Porter, a North Carolina State education professor, has sued the school, alleging that it “intentionally and systematically excluded him from departmental programs and activities that are necessary for him to fulfill his job” for speaking out against the DEI agenda.

All this creates a climate of pervasive fear on campus and shuts down what should be an important academic discussion. After I wrote an article in these pages about the intrusion of ideology into science, I heard from faculty around the country who wrote under pseudonyms that they were afraid of being marginalized, disciplined or fired if administrators discovered their emails.

Beyond these fearful faculty members, and talented would-be scientists who will be dissuaded or excluded from academic research, DEI offices are working to indoctrinate incoming students. This year at Princeton, the New York Post reports, freshmen were required to watch a video promoting “social justice” and describing dissenting debate as “masculine-ized bravado.” If such efforts succeed, a new generation of students won’t have the opportunity to subject their own viewpoints to challenge—surely one of the benefits of higher education.

Critics have likened DEI statements to the loyalty oaths of the Red Scare. In 1950 the University of California fired 31 faculty members for refusing to sign a statement disavowing any party advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. That violated their freedom of speech and conscience, but this is worse. Whereas a loyalty oath compels assent to authority, a DEI statement demands active ideological engagement. It’s less like the excesses of anticommunism than like communism itself.

1...3,3273,3283,329...3,908Page 3,328 of 3,908
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2025 American Faith Media Network. All rights reserved.