- All articles

All articles

- Fans Take On Marvel, DC, And The Comic Book Industry’s SJW Self-Destruction

- Federal Judge Blasts Mueller: You Only Care About Getting Trump

- National Shooting Sports Foundation Just Expelled Dick’s Sporting Goods Over Gun Control Lobbying

- Rudy Giuliani Knows Exactly What He’s Doing

- How California’s LGBT Therapy Ban Could Ban Christianity Itself

- The Real Villain in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Is Overpopulation Panic

- How For-Profit Universities’ Conversion To Nonprofits Will Up-End Higher Education

- The Incel Movement Isn’t Really About Demanding A Right To Sex

- China Is Guilty Of A Billion Times More Cultural Theft Than Some Kid In A Prom Dress

- By ‘The Week Of,’ Adam Sandler’s Star Has Dimmed, Leaving A Vacuum In Comedy

- Arizona Parents And Taxpayers Aren’t Pleased With Striking Teachers Ditching School For 6 Days

- How To Make A Caring And Critical Assessment Of Pope Francis

- Dear Roman Catholics: Let’s Let The Megachurches Keep Their Rock Concerts, Okay?

- Politicos Dogpile On Tom Price For Telling The Truth About Obamacare

- Springfield Armory Severs Ties With Dick’s Sporting Goods Over Gun Control Lobbying

- Amazon Boots Christian Nonprofit From Donations Program Because Of SPLC’s ‘Hate List’

- Washington Post ‘Fact Check’ On James Clapper’s Leaks Ignores Basic Facts

- Hollywood Excommunicates Roman Polanski 40 Years After Child Rape Conviction

- The FBI Shouldn’t Be Above The Law Either

- Podcast: A New Era Of Public Opinion Polling, Data, And Market Research

Fans Take On Marvel, DC, And The Comic Book Industry’s SJW Self-Destruction

4, 2018 By The Federalist Staff

May

SUBSCRIBE TO THE FEDERALIST RADIO HOUR HERE.

The creator and host of the “Diversity & Comics” Youtube Channel, Zack, joins Ben Domenech and Ace of Ace of Spades HQ blog, on this episode of Federalist Radio.

They host a round table discussion on how lifelong comic fans are now fighting back (and winning) against the social justice warrior take over of Marvel, DC, and the comics industry.

The “Diversity & Comics” founder has responded to the corporations with his own graphic novel, based on action and not political correctness. Check it out here.

Listen to the show here:

Federal Judge Blasts Mueller: You Only Care About Getting Trump

4, 2018 By Madeline Osburn

May

A federal judge criticized special counsel Robert Mueller and the scope of his team’s probe Friday morning during a hearing related to fraud charges brought against former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III grilled the special counsel’s team for nearly an hour, questioning their “unfettered power” to prosecute and their desire to “tighten the screws” on Manafort, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian. Ellis said he doesn’t see how Manafort’s indictment is related to what Mueller’s team is authorized to investigate.

“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” Ellis told Mueller’s team, according to a Fox News report. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”

Bank fraud charges did not arise from the Mueller probe and unrelated to #Russia or the @realDonaldTrump campaign, says federal judge.

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) May 4, 2018

Despite the intense questioning, Ellis did not issue an immediate ruling on Manafort’s case. The trail is set to begin on July 10, 2018.

The 77-year-old judge served as a Navy pilot, graduated from Harvard Law School, and was appointed to the district court by President Reagan.

National Shooting Sports Foundation Just Expelled Dick’s Sporting Goods Over Gun Control Lobbying

4, 2018 By Sean Davis

May

The nation’s largest firearms trade association expelled Dick’s Sporting Goods on Friday morning, citing the retailer’s decision to hire multiple gun control lobbyists. The vote to expel Dick’s from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, or NSSF, was unanimous, the group said in a press release issued Friday morning.

“The National Shooting Sports Foundation® (NSSF®), the trade association for the firearms, ammunition, hunting and shooting sports industries, Board of Governors today unanimously voted to expel Dick’s Sporting Goods from membership for conduct detrimental to the best interests of the Foundation,” the group announced.

NSSF cited the hiring by Dick’s of lobbyists to push for gun control as a major impetus for the decision to expel Dick’s from NSSF’s membership.

NSSF’s vote to expel Dick’s Sporting Goods follows news first reported by The Federalist that Dick’s hired three lobbyists to push exclusively for gun control. Federal lobbying disclosure records show that the lobbyists were hired on April 27, 2018, for the sole purpose of “[l]obbying related to gun control.” The previous lobbyist for Dick’s, a Republican who formerly worked for the House Financial Services committee, was fired in late January. Instead of pushing for gun control, that lobbyist had focused on tax reform, cybersecurity, and patent litigation reform on behalf of Dick’s, according to federal lobbying records.

NSSF previously expressed disappointment at decisions by Dick’s Sporting Goods to no longer sell modern assault rifles or to sell rifles to anyone under the age of 21, despite there being no federal prohibition against such sales.

“Nonetheless, we are disappointed by the decision of Dick’s Sporting Goods to stop selling modern sporting rifles at its 35 Field & Stream stores, to cease sales of certain magazines and to raise the purchase age to 21 for all firearms at all its stores,” the group stated in a press release issued at the time.

NSSF reiterated its support for constitutional solutions to reduce gun violence and encourage responsible gun ownership in that same release.

“On behalf of our industry, NSSF supports effective solutions to achieve that goal, which is shared by all Americans. NSSF strongly supports and calls upon Congress to immediately pass the Fix NICS bill – named after our program of the same name – to increase the reporting of all disqualifying criminal and applicable mental health records to the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database to increase the effectiveness of the system on which our nation’s retailers depend.”

Rudy Giuliani Knows Exactly What He’s Doing

Former federal prosecutor and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has a simple message to Robert Mueller: Put up or shut up.

By David Marcus

4, 2018

May

The day after President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani unexpectedly admitted on cable news that his client had reimbursed Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for the payout to Stormy Daniels, he was roundly criticized for having gone off the reservation and compromising the White House. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, Giuliani, a bare-knuckles brawler in the rings of both politics and litigation, was laying down a marker. The former New York mayor is sending a clear message to Special Counsel Robert Mueller: It’s been more than a year; show your cards. Put up or shut up.

Giuliani was showing his cards when he explained that Trump had personally covered the $130,000 payout to Daniels. Cohen was on retainer, and apparently empowered to take care of these kinds of situations without telling Trump, thereby insulating his boss. This might not be pretty, or the kind of thing a Mitt Romney would do, but it’s not illegal.

Journalists howled that Giuliani had gotten in front of the White House, that the comms team was blindsided by his revelation. But he was only getting out in front of the truth, and maybe he didn’t tell the White House staff because he didn’t want it to leak before he had a chance to tell the story first. Maybe he wanted this to be an explanation, not an admission.

Did Trump Lie on Air Force One?

A criticism of Giuliani’s revelation, which he offered without even being asked about it, is that it proves Trump lied on Air Force One when he said he didn’t know anything about the payment to Daniels. But the facts don’t bear this out. According to his attorney, Trump knew nothing of the payout at the time it was paid, and even while repaying it was not aware exactly what Cohen had fixed. Giuliani says Trump only found out he paid for the Stormy silence 10 days to two weeks ago.

This didn’t stop the news media from insisting that Trump had been caught in a lie, and that doddering old man Giuliani had skipped the sunset special at the old folks’ home to inadvertently throw his client under the bus. But let’s take a step back. Giuliani knew Trump had personally repaid Cohen. He knew this would come out. He put it out first and took control of the narrative. That’s not doddering, it’s good lawyering.

It’s Mueller Time

Somewhat lost in the Sean Hannity interview where Rudy spilled the beans was his offer to have the president sit down with Mueller for two to three hours to answer questions within a limited scope. The message from Giuliani, which he made clear when he joined the president’s legal team, is that it’s been more than a year and we need some answers.

Just about an hour before Giuliani broke the news cycle, former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo was on cable news recounting his experience being interviewed by the Mueller team. He said something interesting. He said the Mueller investigation knows more about the Trump campaign than anyone who worked on it. This is telling.

If the Mueller investigation, which the White House has cooperated with, has every bit of information regarding the campaign, what more does it need to tell the American people if collusion with Russia took place? This is the question Giuliani is asking. He is even offering that his client, the president of the United States is willing to sit down and clear things up. It’s a good question, and one the American people should be asking: When will Mueller tell us what he knows?

Rudy Plays Offense

Throughout his career, as a prosecutor who brought down the mob, as a politician who transformed the city of New York, and now as the president’s attorney, Giuliani has played offense. He’s chosen his own ground to fight on and winked at his opponents and detractors, begging them to take the first shot. Come at me is his mantra. It’s no surprise President Trump finds solace in his counsel.

The message to Mueller could not be clearer: What do you got? And it is asked with a New York swagger that perhaps only Rudy has perfected more completely than Trump. Giuliani is convinced that the Mueller investigation has nothing on his client. It may indict Russians, it may find that Paul Manafort engaged in shady business practices, it might find that James Comey bravely broke the law, but on Trump it has nothing.

That’s the bet. It’s the marker Rudy is laying down. He says Mueller has bubkis, and he’s offering the special counsel a way out, offering an off-ramp to a constitutional crisis. Mueller can seek a subpoena and compel the president to testify under oath with no constraints. He might win; he might lose. But if he has evidence of collusion, why not take the offered opportunity to confront Trump about that evidence? Why not take the offer Giuliani is giving?

When Giuliani joined the president’s legal team, his goal was clear. It was to get the investigation finished as soon as possible. It’s an estimable goal. If the president of the United States colluded with Russia to steal an election, we need to know about it, and we need to know about it now. If he didn’t, then we need to remove the cloud from an administration in the midst of careful and dangerous dealings in places like Iran and North Korea.

Giuliani is going all-in. All the chips are on the table, and the cards are ready to be flipped. What hand does Mueller have? Most Americans would like to see his cards. Public support for the Mueller investigation is declining, according to the polls, so the time is now. Let’s see your cards, Mr. Mueller. Rudy has laid his on the table. The American people deserve to see yours.

David Marcus is the Federalist's New York Correspondent and the Artistic Director of Blue Box World, a Brooklyn based theater project. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.

How California’s LGBT Therapy Ban Could Ban Christianity Itself

It is ostensibly a ban on gay and transgender 'conversion therapy,' but the bill's vague and sweeping text could affect essentially every institution of every religion that affirms sexual complementarity.

By Joy Pullmann

4, 2018

May

Three-quarters of California’s state assembly supported a bill that has striking implications for American citizens’ first freedoms, in that state and nationally. It is ostensibly a ban on gay and transgender “conversion therapy,” but the bill’s vague and sweeping text could affect essentially every institution of every religion that affirms sexual complementarity.

We’re talking churches, schools, religious charities, summer camps — every forum that involves a financial transaction could be banned from allowing any discussion of basic doctrines of sexuality that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, among others, have held for thousands of years. We’re talking core doctrines of religions adhered to by billions of people being outlawed from discussion in any forum that involves money changing hands, possibly even houses of worship themselves.

I know that sounds outlandish, but that is a plain reading of the bill text. Let’s look at it.

The bill amends the state’s commercial fraud laws as follows:

The following unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices undertaken by any person in a transaction intended to result or that results in the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer are unlawful:… Advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual. (emphasis added)

So the bill would ban advertising or offering to engage in “sexual orientation change efforts.” The bill defines “Sexual orientation change efforts” as “any practices that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex” (emphasis added).

This reads like it could easily ban pastors, rabbis, and imams from preaching or counseling parishioners on same-sex attraction or desires to approximate the opposite sex. It clearly could also apply to a person who is paid to educate, exhort, and counsel parishioners on their faith simply stating what the Bible, Torah, or Koran, together with their respective theological traditions, teaches on human sexuality.

To state that something is authoritatively true and explain why and how, which are inherent functions of religious teaching, is an attempt to persuade people to believe it, and therefore live accordingly. That would apply to stating something like “God made humans male and female,” a direct quote from three different Bible passages (1, 2, 3), including the words of Christ himself.

That contradicts LGBT ideology that men and women are interchangeable. Saying so, presenting an alternative idea, could persuade people to live accordingly. The bill attempts to ban this. Thus, the bill  seems to gag religious leaders from stating their own faith’s teachings so long as that leader is compensated for doing so.

I’m not the only one reading it that way. An Alliance Defending Freedom legal analysis gives these examples, among others, of activities the bill would ban:

• A bookstore (including online bookstores like Amazon) could not sell many recently published books challenging gender identity ideology and advocating that these beliefs should be rejected by society; and

• A pastor paid to speak at an event addressing current social topics could not encourage attendees that they can prevail over same-sex desires or feelings that they were born the wrong sex.

“At its core, AB 2943 outlaws speech, whether offered by a licensed counselor, a best-selling author, or even a minister or religious leader,” ADF’s analysis says. The bill’s speech ban is triggered when money changes hands to facilitate the speech, which is why it’s an amendment to the state’s commercial fraud law. “AB 2943 labels such faith-driven activity as fraudulent and deceptive practices, subjecting anyone who engages in them to ruinous lawsuits, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees,” the analysis says.

Essentially all U.S. clergy who adhere to the orthodox teachings of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism financially “transact” with their congregations to provide services such as preaching, teaching, and counseling. ADF notes the law the bill would modify “specifically commands that it be ‘liberally construed and applied.'” It also includes no religious exemption, which might mitigate some of these effects I’ve described (although it wouldn’t alleviate all). We’re talking essentially outlawing major religions here. Or, at least, forbidding people from practicing or even learning about a significant component of their own faith.

That is of course banning the faith entirely, because religions are a package deal. The entire point of a religion is to offer comprehensive ways of understanding and contextualizing the universe and our place in it. To ban part of it is to ban the whole. It’s like saying “We’re not banning math, only multiplication.” Okay, you aren’t free to do real math without the possibility of using multiplication.

If it would gag pastors, the bill would also gag employees of religious institutions such as schools, summer camps, churches, universities, daycares, hospitals, mental health clinics, conference and retreat centers, and poverty relief organizations. It would gag employees of non-religious institutions whose religion informs their work, as do many employees in foster care, counseling, mental health, education, and other social welfare fields. Any person or organization that takes money for services or goods and expresses an idea — even to willing listeners! — that could be construed as encouraging sexual orientation change would be liable for emotionally and financially devastating lawsuits.

When LGBT activists were pushing for legal recognition of same-sex relationships, they told us, “What we do in the bedroom has nothing to do with you.” We heard a lot about “love” and “tolerance.”

It’s impossible to square those promises with this bill — or disorienting innocent kindergarteners with the idea that boys can turn into girls, or using government force to ruin the private businesses of religious believers for not wanting to participate in acts their deepest beliefs condemn, or insisting HIV-positive people have no legal obligation to disclose that fact when they risk transmitting that disease to non-consenting people, or shutting down organizations that help orphans find homes, or pushing to mutilate minors‘ natural and healthy body parts, or hounding an onscreen prostitute into suicide for not wanting to participate in gay sex.

The LGBT movement keeps telling us they want nothing more than to coexist with the same freedoms we all have. They want “equality.” But it looks like that really means severely curtailing our freedoms into some activists’ view of an extremely limited way of life that precludes deep and old religious understandings of the world. It looks like their version of “equality” means “equally limited, micromanaged, harassed, afraid, and coerced by a narrow, uniform vision of existence controlled by people with big axes to grind.”

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist and author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," out from Encounter Books in 2017. Get it on Amazon.

The Real Villain in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Is Overpopulation Panic

That the film paints Malthusian calculus in such an unflattering light just as a wave of editorials are confessing the unrealized horrors of population panic is one heck of a coincidence.

By G. Shane Morris

4, 2018

May

It’s a simple premise: The world has finite resources. Human population, and thus consumption of those resources, cannot increase forever. Eventually, demand will outpace Earth’s supply of food, water, fuel, and land, and mass-extinction will ensue — for us, and possibly for all life. We will literally eat ourselves to death.

This simple premise and its intuitive conclusion are at the heart of a branch of economics founded by eighteenth-century English scholar, Thomas Malthus, who wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” They’re also at the heart of Disney and Marvel’s most successful comic book flick to date, “Avengers: Infinity War.” But it’s not beloved heroes like Iron-Man, Captain America, Thor, or The Incredible Hulk delivering Malthusian monologues.

It’s Marvel’s meanest, mightiest, mauvest bad guy yet: Thanos, “the Mad Titan.” We can take this as a virtual guarantee that Malthusian theory in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, just as in the real world, will be devastatingly discredited.

Marvel’s Conservative Turn

It’s not the first time the studio has Hulk-smashed left-wing orthodoxy. Watching Marvel’s last box-office record-breaker, “Black Panther,” I couldn’t help glancing around the theater to see if anyone else was hearing what I was hearing. Lines we have come to expect from radical race activists about the inherent evil and ancestral guilt of those with light skin and the futility of discussing racism with whites, about the global brotherhood and shared grievance of those with dark skin — about reparations owed, and armed resistance, and revenge — all came from the mouth of the movie’s villain, the aptly-named Killmonger.

The story’s hero (King T’Challa), meanwhile, speaks of forgiveness, of reconciliation, and of moving beyond the past and rising above victimhood. Killmonger dies with a bitter epithet about slavery on his lips, while T’challa opens outreach centers for inner-city kids. In short, “Black Panther” is a repudiation of so much of modern, intersectional thought. Its boils down to the need of black boys — as of all boys — for father-figures. Its moral was almost jarringly conservative.

I thought this might be a fluke, but I was wrong.

Thanos: Mad Titan, Malthusian

“Infinity War” casts its big baddie as a champion of yet another progressive pet cause: Population control. Thanos, who has teased audiences with sinister grins and cryptic statements in years of after-credit scenes, has finally revealed his true motive: He wants to wipe out half the galaxy’s population to make sure the other half has plenty to eat.

We watch during his obligatory villain speech as Thanos explains why he needs the power of the Infinity Stones: to teleport from planet to planet, killing billions in order to defuse the population bomb that desolated his home world. He does so on the assumption that Thomas Malthus first propounded: that each species has limited resources at its disposal, and the only way to keep from exhausting them is to check population growth.

In a particularly poignant scene, the purple alien warlord explains to a kidnapped child (who becomes his adopted daughter, Gamora), why he is determined to cull her race (including her parents): balance. Too much of anything is deadly. Too many people mean too little food to go around. Too much life will inevitably bring death to all. Thanks to his genocidal campaign, Thanos tells Gamora the survivors of her race go to bed with “bellies full.”

Without giving too much away, the final scene of the movie sees Thanos’ goal apparently realized, and Earth’s mightiest heroes in need of a miracle (which will no doubt arrive in next year’s conclusion).

Ehrlich’s Deadly Dud

That “Infinity War” paints Malthusian calculus in such an unflattering light just as a wave of editorials are confessing the unrealized horrors of population panic is one heck of a coincidence. Three years ago, The New York Times ran a spectacular video essay admitting the thorough failure of another oracle of doom, Stanford professor and spiritual-heir-to-Malthus, Paul Ehrlich. Just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn said last rites over Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb,” which dropped and failed to explode fifty years ago.

In the bestselling tome, Ehrlich predicted that “the battle to feed humanity” was “over.” Earth had exceeded what he called its “carrying capacity.” Hundreds of millions would die of starvation within a decade, he wrote, India was doomed no matter what, the average American’s lifespan would fall to 42 by 1980, and England would no longer exist by the year 2000.

It hardly needs saying that Ehrlich was wrong — not just wrong like someone who thought Thanos would be defeated by the end of “Infinity War,” but wrong in that spectacular and mortifying way only a carefully-studied and smugly confident scholar can be.

Not only did hundreds of millions not starve in the years following Ehrlich’s prognostication, but thanks to a “green revolution,” worldwide food production tripled while population more than doubled, global absolute poverty fell to its lowest level on record, the average human life expectancy climbed to its highest level ever, and India and England went right on existing.

Tragically, millions did die, not because of the scarcities Ehrlich predicted, but because of world leaders who took his theory seriously. China’s one-child policy led to forced abortions and 30 million missing baby girls. The Indian government surgically sterilized at least four million women, causing countless deaths from injury and infection. And of course, Western intellectuals and activists keep right on claiming that abortion is justified for the sake of the environment. Some even insist having too many kids is immoral, and might need to be outlawed. It’s common to hear progressives even now cite overpopulation as the reason they support the so-called “right to choose.”

The Ultimate Resource: People

What all of these people missed is something Ehrlich’s arch-nemisis, University of Illinois professor Julian Simon, observed in his 1981 book, “The Ultimate Resource.” Besides food, water, fuel, and land, Simon argued that there is another resource Malthusians fail to take into account: human ingenuity. This awesome resource is one that increases with population, and makes it impossible for us to know how far new inventions can stretch or renew existing natural resources.

“It is your mind,” writes Simon, “that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.”

Simon believed so firmly in his thesis that in 1980, he made a wager with Ehrlich: In ten years, he the prices of five key metals would fall. Ehrlich said they would skyrocket. In 1990, Simon won the bet and Ehrlich added another failed prediction to his collection.

Of course, there are other reasons not to be worried about overpopulation. Global population growth is slowing, and many experts predict it will level off or even reverse within a few decades. This is due to the natural dip in fertility that accompanies a transition from subsistence farming (in which children are your employees and retirement plan) to skilled labor and service economies. India’s fertility rate, for example, is less than half what it was forty years ago.

To put it simply, the supervillain schemes of Malthusian population control have killed a lot of people, left others maimed and miserable, and caused decades of panic for no good reason. We are billions of people beyond what the Malthusian masterminds of yesteryear told us the Earth could carry. Yet productivity continues to outpace population, thanks in no small part to human ingenuity, which increases with every new mind that applies itself to the puzzle. Are people a problem? Maybe so. But we’re also the solution.

The latest “Avengers” movie may be a popcorn flick — a multi-million-dollar monument to comic book whimsy meant to entertain, not rebuke Paul Ehrlich, Thomas Malthus, or any other prophet of population doom. But the fact that this film’s genocidal villain is peddling the same panicked theories they did on the fiftieth anniversary of their best-known book is too good to ignore. I expect next year’s conclusion will see Thanos and his theory deposited in the dustbin, alongside the works of Ehrlich, Malthus, and everyone else who failed to grasp the marvel of human ingenuity.

G. Shane Morris is a senior writer at BreakPoint, a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s also written for Summit Ministries and The Christian Post, and blogs regularly at Patheos. Shane lives with his wife and three children in Tampa, Florida.

How For-Profit Universities’ Conversion To Nonprofits Will Up-End Higher Education

If regulators pursue former for-profits with the same zeal after they become nonprofits, they risk being required to evaluate traditional colleges according to the same standards.

By John Carroll

4, 2018

May

Just when it seemed the war between traditional, nonprofit universities and for-profit universities had ended in a decisive victory for the former, public and private nonprofit universities face a new threat from for-profit colleges.  As online education becomes the new norm in higher education, the two sectors are converging.

Recognizing the benefits of online education to attract new, nontraditional students, traditional colleges have increasingly begun to embrace online education. At the same time, for-profits—recognizing the regulatory shelter that nonprofits have long enjoyed—have begun to spin off the for-profit sides of their enterprises to convert to nonprofit status.

Given the very nature of for-profit education to be disruptive, agile, and Darwinian, this is unsurprising. Regional accreditors and federal regulators have scrutinized for-profits much more deeply than they ever have most public and private nonprofit universities. But this is about to change, and not because regulators have a newfound concern for students at public and private nonprofit universities. Rather, it is because for-profit institutions are petitioning to become nonprofits, and they could bring their burdensome regulatory baggage with them.

We Want a Piece of the Prize Pie

In March, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) approved for-profit Grand Canyon University’s (GCU) bid to become a nonprofit entity. While the change still must be approved by the Arizona Board for Private Postsecondary Education, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), and the Internal Revenue Service, earning approval from their regional accreditor is arguably the most important first step toward their transformation.

This is a surprising development, considering that in 2016, the HLC denied Grand Canyon’s request to change their tax status. If successful, they will split into two organizations: one a nonprofit university eligible for federal research grants and tax-free donations, the other a for-profit online program management company providing essential university operations, such as student recruitment, academic counseling, and financial aid processing.

The process began slowly with Herzing University, Remington College, and Everglades College all converting over the last couple of decades. Recently, for-profit provider Education Management Corporation (EDMC) successfully transformed its holdings—South University, Argosy University, The Art Institutes, and Western States College of Law—to nonprofits by selling them to the nonprofit Dream Learning Center Foundation. That transaction was finalized in January.

Bridgepoint Education’s Ashford University has also expressed a desire to convert from for-profit to nonprofit. Grand Canyon and Ashford are the latest universities to view this as a viable strategy to seek shelter in nonprofit status from government regulations imposed on for-profits.

The Game Is All About Getting Taxpayers’ Money

Grand Canyon and Ashford University have a history of changing tax statuses. Both were nonprofits that became for-profits and are seeking to return to their nonprofit roots. In a type of Trojan Horse strategy, start-up for-profits have sometimes bought out struggling liberal arts colleges, as Bridgepoint did with Ashford, to avoid the lengthy and difficult process of becoming regionally accredited in their own right.

Universities cannot process Title IV federal funding (federal student loans and Pell grants) without some form of accreditation approved by the Department of Education. In the absence of Title IV subsidies, most universities would come to an abrupt end. Bridgepoint’s acquisition of Ashford bought their regional accreditation and Ashford’s board of trustees saved the institution from insolvency and closure. The board’s actions were not without controversy.

Robert Shireman, a fellow at the Century Foundation and former USDOE employee, has warned in a variety of publications over a number of years that for-profit to nonprofit conversions should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, if not prohibited. Newly formed nonprofit boards may face ethical dilemmas as their dependence on revenue generated from the online program management companies moves them away from mission-driven decisions and toward financially motivated ones.

The more strident critics of for-profit universities have long argued that profit-seeking is incompatible with higher education because the profit motive eventually overtakes sound educational decision-making. This argument will become increasingly difficult to sustain after for-profits separate their business and academic operations.

These newly converted nonprofit institutions will be eligible to receive federal research grants, build tax-exempt endowments, and engage in academic endeavors just like others in the academy. However, they will be partnered with online program management companies that are not only profit-seeking, but will be profit-generating. These management companies will likely continue the same business practices that drew so much unwanted attention, but now, the colleges will be able to avoid the enhanced regulations placed upon for-profits.

Updated Regulations Put Traditional U In the Crosshairs

Given the pace and scope of these conversions, accreditors and regulators will eventually adapt their rules and methods to evaluate how online program management companies interact with and influence their newly formed nonprofit patrons. Former for-profits will argue they should not be subject to additional oversight because they are a private nonprofit university just like thousands of others, and will likely have legal standing for these arguments. Jason Delisle and Preston Cooper, researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, favor equity of oversight for all colleges, arguing that all should be held to the same standards regardless of their tax status.

The crux of the problem, not surprisingly, is oversight. If accreditors and regulators pursue former for-profits with the same zeal they did before converting, they risk being required to evaluate traditional colleges according to the same standards, which public and private nonprofit universities—particularly the larger ones—will fight tooth and nail. They do not want for-profit-style oversight any more than for-profits do.

What traditional nonprofits do want is to acquire the online education models’ ability to capture more of the adult student market (the fastest-growing demographic in higher education), serve former members of the military, and leverage for-profit’s operational efficiency and expertise.

Purdue University’s acquisition of for-profit Kaplan University accomplished all of these goals with one transaction. Purdue acquired Kaplan’s online education infrastructure, 15 locations, and more than 32,000 students—most of whom are adults and former military—and Kaplan not only stayed in business (albeit under a new name) but was also the beneficiary of Purdue’s bona fides. Financially, it was a windfall for Purdue, as Kaplan generated $600 million in profits on $1.6 billion in revenue in 2016.

This alone was of immense benefit as Purdue continues to fulfill its 2013 commitment to freeze tuition and cut costs. But while cost cutting may be a noble gesture, it only goes so far. At some point, any public and private nonprofit that chooses a similar path will find it must raise additional revenue to remain solvent, and online education appears to be a reliable and time-tested fiscal lifeline.

Can Anyone Say ‘Diploma Mill’?

In five years, Arizona State University’s (ASU) enrollment has grown 40 percent, from around 70,000 to over 100,000 students. ASU’s online enrollment has grown to 35,000 and offers over 150, fully online degree programs. Private nonprofits are also recognizing the benefits of offering online degree programs. Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) total enrollment exploded from a sleepy 2,500 in 2005 to more than 80,000 today. The growth at both universities has generated the much-needed cash to fund additional operations and drive expansion.

Since Grand Canyon University’s hiring of former University of Phoenix president Brian Mueller, they have grown rapidly as well. Mueller shepherded GCU’s conversion from a nonprofit residential institution to a successful publicly traded for-profit entity. GCU’s stock price leapt from around 12 in 2010 to $107 today. Now, to take advantage of the shelter afforded to nonprofits, they want to go back to being a nonprofit and spin off their business operations unit into an online program management company.

Traditional universities should be concerned about either the potential for increased oversight that former for-profits may bring, the increased competition, or both.

If the separation is successful, their online program management company will be well-positioned to help other colleges and universities quickly deploy online degree programs. As Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter asserted in his 2013 TED talk, if you can do something at a profit, you can do it at scale, and their information technology infrastructure and business operations expertise are easily scalable.

As more traditional colleges and universities embrace online education, the competition for students will increase. For-profit postsecondary enrollments are already declining due to increased regulation and competition from traditional colleges who, like ASU, have embraced online education. For-profits are fighting back, but in an unconventional way. They are switching sides.

It is likely that many for-profits will succeed in their quest to convert to nonprofit tax status. It is also likely that accreditors and regulators will not stop going after them just because they switched teams, though it will not be that easy as accrediting bodies are generally as hidebound as the most traditional of institutions are.

Former for-profits will have a credible argument that other institutions should undergo the same scrutiny they do. Traditional universities should be concerned about either the potential for increased oversight that former for-profits may bring, the increased competition, or both. After the dust settles, accreditors, regulators, and the late-adapting colleges and universities may awaken to find, not only a Trojan horse among them, but a new Troy.

John Carroll earned a PhD in higher education administration from the University of Texas at Austin and served in academic leadership at a large for-profit university. He currently serves as vice president of customer success at cybersecurity firm London Security Solutions. John lives with his family outside of Austin, Texas. Follow John on Twitter @radicalprof. E-mail John at [email protected]

The Incel Movement Isn’t Really About Demanding A Right To Sex

The core of the incel issue isn’t related to rights at all. Rather than the nature of a right to sex, what’s at stake is the nature of a duty to die.

By James Poulos

4, 2018

May

There’s a problem with the current debate—if you can call it a debate—about incels, the self-described and so-called community of involuntary celibates. This term popped in public discourse recently because a self-described incel drove a van into a crowd in Toronto recently, killing 10. He was angry that women deny sex to some men. Incels characterize sex as a right others are obligated to provide them, and congregate online.

They and their identity have bubbled up to the top of the consciousness stack because of the Internet—how it works, who it organizes, what it enables, and what ideas it does and doesn’t usher forth from its patterns of everyday life.

Common sense and reason would suggest that therefore any satisfying discussion about the incel situation in today’s American life would begin firmly from an understanding of just what life online makes thinkable, desirable, and ridiculous. But that’s not what happened.

Case in point is the arc of drama surrounding Ross Douthat’s recent column on the subject. For source material, Douthat draws on a couple different kinds of intellectual musings on the question of whether some sort of right to sex might exist and if so who should be (ahem) on the receiving end of a more just distribution of sexual activity.

“At a certain point,” he provisionally concludes, “without anyone formally debating the idea of a right to sex, right-thinking people will simply come to agree that some such right exists, and that it makes sense to look to some combination of changed laws, new technologies and evolved mores to fulfill it.”

To Douthat’s critics, the implication of this line of reasoning is that society has an obligation to recognize a sex right in men who are unable in some compelling sense to achieve sex. Because the conversation currently assumes heterosexual sex, the critics objected that no man’s putative sex right could compete with the definitive right of a woman to control her own body.

Sharp disagreement about sex and rights is only to be expected today. But although the Internet has made us prone to advancing rights claims, the reason for that intensity has much to do with the way the Internet has inlaid patterns of experience that do not give rise to notions of rights—and has laid waste to habits of life that make what would otherwise be abstract ideas of rights concrete and incarnate.

Today there is just no question but that life online works around the clock to erode the plausibility of a right to property, privacy, free speech, self-defense, and so on—much less a “fundamental” kind of right to any of these things. This brute fact isn’t here to make us feel good, but it does—or should—direct our energy in the incel “debate” toward the underlying reality of the digital age.

The reality is that getting caught up in rights language isn’t going to help us make the best sense of what’s happening here. Not because anyone’s rights should be wiped away or de-recognized, but because the core of the incel issue isn’t related to rights at all. Rather than the nature of a right to sex, what’s at stake is the nature of a duty to die.

Referring back to the fundamentals of the Internet, digital technology gives historic numbers of relatively unsuccessful men the opportunity for warlike activity of unprecedented regularity that poses zero mortal risk and requires only the use of symbols. Those numbers are pushed even higher by the relatively very low number of men killed off in military conflict.

Many relatively unsuccessful men engaged in constant symbolic warfare online may be more prone to forms of slow-motion suicide than other men. Of course, eventually all relatively unsuccessful men die, and the ranks of their battalions might be thinned out over time.

Yet it’s impossible to ignore how the problem of surplus men, formed by a digital era where military casualties are restricted to faraway people and special forces, has spread throughout the public conflict over men, sex, rights, and bodies. We see it in the simmering desire for the baby boomers to relinquish power and croak already. We see it in the implicit conviction that unappealing yokels, bros, and white trash will just keep on harming America until they are bred out and die off.

We don’t need to subject these notions to a reductio ad Hitlerum. Generational turnover is real and natural. So is the intuitive understanding that only death can move us beyond some conflicts. There’s nothing more “natural” than meeting an “unnatural” death. When China and India willfully produce more than 70 million “surplus” males, our proper natural instinct is dismay, and we reasonably suspect—even if we don’t say it aloud—such a situation is apt to be balanced out only through many early deaths.

Unfortunately, the delusion persists that our society with its surplus of unsuccessful and unhappy men can be made peaceful and harmonious through sheer force of will. Not even Christianity at its most fortifying and forgiving could do that alone. Humble marriage or woke modesty have their power, but for struggling men, the constant in all times and places has been war—often devastating, frequently barbaric.

A society where the vast majority of men almost never march into mortal peril has huge costs virtually no one wants to tally. But we keep racking them up. We rightly prize peace, but we are unprepared to face its full consequences in an age transformed by technology. In our anxiety over the redistribution of sex, we are blinding ourselves to the deeper difficulty of a society where the distribution of death is imbalanced away from the men who have borne its brunt since the beginning of civilization.

Men start wars for dark but inexpugnable reasons. Today’s incels may seem a long way off from tomorrow’s warlords. But in a world upended by unhinged technological change, the distance between them may be closer than most of us dare to imagine.

James Poulos is the author of "The Art of Being Free, out January 17 from St. Martin's.

China Is Guilty Of A Billion Times More Cultural Theft Than Some Kid In A Prom Dress

4, 2018 By Kenny Xu

May

Chinese manufacturers are shipping thousands of fake iPhones to more than 30 fake Apple stores in the city of Shenzhen alone. These phones are designed to look just like the Apple original, capitalizing on the American brand to sell look-a-likes to the emerging Chinese middle-class.

The market for fake iPhones had once been so strong that in 2009 it comprised 20 percent of all Chinese smartphones. The Chinese government has been perfectly content to let their factories appropriate and imitate our technology until it no longer becomes useful to them. For example, just as China apologizes for letting its companies run amok with Apple brands and technology, its factories are now being accused of stealing our wind turbine trade secrets. It’s almost as if they know we’re in on the joke.

I write this because of a debate stirred over many corners and fathoms of the Internet about a Utah girl who wore a “traditional” Chinese dress called a Qipao. The Qipao is actually a Western-Chinese hybrid dress, which, of course, only adds to the absurdity of the fact that even though the Chinese first appropriated Western fashion to design this dress, it is now being attacked as Western cultural appropriation of Chinese fashion. How dare a Westerner attempt to wear a cultural garment that the Chinese stylized from the West! And, as it turns out, dresses aren’t the only thing the Chinese have “stylized” from the West.

For one, Chinese hackers, rippers, and burners have been taking our digital cultural products almost 20 years running. In 2011, illegally pirating Hollywood movies raked in $6 billion for the Chinese economy. By comparison, China generates close to $1.5 billion in box-office receipts every year. A 2012 report pegged illegal music downloads as comprising 99 percent of total music downloads in China.

Talk about exploiting other people’s cultural products for “consumerism,” as one Twitter personality described the use of the Qipao prom dress. We love to look upon China as a pristine land of straw umbrella-hats and cute rice paddies. The reality is that China is voracious, shameless, and extremely skilled at turning our cultural exports into their profit — and then acting like they don’t know any better.

But Chinese appropriation of American property goes far beyond mild economic mischief into putting our companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. A scathing 2018 New York Times report notes that China will “Beg, Borrow, or Steal” their way into U.S. trade secrets, happily taking whatever we are too clumsy to watch carefully. This includes extorting American electric car companies to give up control of their technology in exchange for permits to sell to Chinese residents. This also includes pressuring U.S. technology companies to give up sensitive operations research for the Chinese government to “review.”

Altogether, theft of trade secrets directly accounts for between $150-500 billion in lost U.S. revenue per year, and that doesn’t even include the indirect revenue lost by training up future domestic competitors to crowd out U.S. businesses operating in China. To return to the phone example, China now boasts a domestic smartphone market that captures over 70 percent of Chinese consumers, up from zero ten years ago. These “homegrown” smartphone makers now produce phones in the same factories that Apple and Samsung used to make their wares. It appears likely that these domestic brands got a major leg up from their former tenants – probably without their permission.

What is truly worrying, however, is how China has let loose its copycat animals upon the most sacred of our technology — defense. Like prey who would prefer to be duped into capture, we let the Chinese make 5,000 visits to U.S. laboratories per year, according to the Institute of World Politics. These visits can be had for a duration of up to 2 years, and they include tours of high-security premises and sensitive defense technologies. And China is hardly putting on the brakes.

A comprehensive new cybersecurity law passed by the ruling Communist Party allows the government to conduct unannounced security reviews of any technology companies operating in China that “could affect national security.”  China’s reported completion of the J-20, one of the world’s most technologically advanced stealth fighter jets, was bolstered heavily in part by industrial espionage on U.S. soil. No, this isn’t just about Levi’s Jeans and prom dresses anymore. This is about the appropriation of U.S. goods and services on a grand, even possibly a nation-threatening scale.

When we talk about cultural appropriation, we often fail to realize how little other people across the world care about it. To rapidly globalizing powers like China, it is practically a national sport to copy our products, with corporate horse-races to see who can imitate our latest innovations first. The fact that we can even get outraged over one girl’s prom dress is a product of our privileged position within the world’s cultural and technological hierarchies — one that we risk surrendering, if we don’t get serious about who’s really doing the appropriating in this relationship.

By ‘The Week Of,’ Adam Sandler’s Star Has Dimmed, Leaving A Vacuum In Comedy

We might get rid of Adam Sandler, but we will need his understanding of providence again, or else our entertainment will turn to despair.

By Titus Techera

4, 2018

May

For more than twenty years now, Adam Sandler has been America’s comic champion of democracy. He has taken it upon himself to give a sentimental account of American freedom and the humiliation suffered by outcasts. He thought America too enamored of glamour — so he decided to be the counter-cultural hero of the times. He wanted to achieve success by failure, to show how lovable the unglamorous are. Since magazines and TV only pay attention to celebrities, he wanted to celebrate the humanity of the forgotten instead.

Sandler movies typically come to a happy end by humbling the proud and redeeming the humble. In the element of comedy, by the use of a contrived plot where every accident is planned, Sandler can get all Americans to come together. He brings the pretentious low and raises the disdained in a comic equivalent of the middle class.

He’s neither left nor right, politically. Strict morality is negotiable in his stories and capitalism is useful. Family, not individualism, is the basis of society, but family is flexible enough to adapt to social changes in an age of individual self-expression. Justice wins, but some laws are bent in the process. Cleverness, in short, is put in service to our human dignity, which grounds our equality despite all our differences.

But, lately, his star has dimmed and there is no one left in America to unite the country by comedy. It is only the misery of the times that shows what a rare and unique thing he attempted and what a humble claim to greatness he once made. It’s not obvious why he should have been eclipsed, because Sandler positioned himself very well for the future of American entertainment by signing a deal with Netflix, for six movies, the fourth of which is now available: “The Week Of.”

This is a very mediocre picture, funny at times and wearisome at times. Sandler plays a Jewish father on Long Island, whose daughter is getting married to Chris Rock’s son. Chris Rock plays a rich surgeon from L.A. who cheated on his wife until she divorced him and who still lives the life of a glamorous playboy. (This is strangely close to Chris Rock’s own revelations of his infidelity in his recent Netflix comedy show, “Tambourine.”)

What should follow is a comedy where racial difference are solved, inasmuch as possible, by turning into social class differences. This way, everyone gets a chance at redemption if they humble themselves enough to be made fun of, because rich can turn into poor or the poor rich. Sandler tries to pull it off, but the movie just lacks a good plot — it fails to find the right comic accidents and foolish mistakes to the happy end it needs.

Maybe he doesn’t know how to write for the times — his inclination is to make fun of himself, not to mock the class contempt that poisons American society. He might need to be crueler to be kind. At the same time, he’s trying very hard to elevate family above career, which is a hard sell these days, and he just fails to put enough trusting love into the family comedy. Of course, our entertainment has wiped out the family from our consciousness, and our society is very bad at it, too — it’s our own failures we see in the movie.

The best part of the movie shows in exasperating detail the foolishness and failures of middle-class families that try to provide a better life for their kids than they had themselves. Sandler does an admirably earnest portrayal of a father who fears he is losing his daughter and thus tries to give her the best wedding he can, only to face everywhere the meagerness of his means. His kindness and willingness to bear insult is not rewarded in modern America. With proper writing, the movie would have shown that the burden of comedy is to make the agony of downward mobility bearable.

My suspicion is, America doesn’t care for this sort of humor anymore. Who has patience for the ugly and the foolish, for the embarrassing and the awkward? Our recent political obsession make us so righteous that we cannot afford to put a foot wrong. Our economic insecurity makes us dangerously hard of heart when it comes to securing a place in a future where not all Americans can find happiness and where, to tell the ugly truth, larger and larger numbers self-destruct in despair. Our society is confused by technological change, so we don’t know quite how to be social.

Sandler is not prepared to deal with these changes and his audience, to judge by lack of media interest, seems to be abandoning him. People no longer trust that he can find a way to get them from their worst fears all the way to their better angels, so his moral convictions — his artistic humanism — now seem quaint. But the vulgarity of Sandler’s comedy thus reveals itself to be far more tender and far more careful of our lives than we ourselves can tolerate. He never stopped loving us — but we just cannot allow our private weaknesses to reveal our characters anymore and we dare not laugh at ourselves to save our sanity.

In some way, he’s stuck in the past. Before his Netflix deals, Sandler tried to make movies about middle-class dignity and how family should work, two of which were both successful and worthwhile, “Just go with it” and “Grownups.” But that image of middle-class life has simply been destroyed in our entertainment and he knows it. His Jewish jokes and his lovably dysfunctional family are self-consciously old-school, because he wants people not to forget what stability felt like.

Unfortunately, he is himself confused, ever since he gained his freedom from studio control, whereas most of his movies previously were always morally sound and often unrivaled for their willingness and ability to lay bare the fears of the American soul. Without him, we see that our entertainment can only show us our fears by turning them into nightmares that get as boring as they are bleak. We’ve simply lost the courage for comedy.

Even so, his Netflix movies are shows of the Sandler ethos. “The Ridiculous Six” was a Western farce intent on achieving a dignified equality for every race and every generation, making America one comically screwed-up family, but a family that was able, in the freedom of the lawless Old West, to assert human dignity and defend it from exploitation. It dealt with our problems of family collapse and had the courage to portray bastardy. If you don’t think Sandler is heroic in his comic way, consider that almost no one in the press or in entertainment dares to say the word, much less to face the facts or deal with the people involved.

That was funny, all-American movie. His second effort, however, “The Do-over,” was a catastrophe typical of our individualistic instincts. We sometimes want to escape our lives and some people really want to escape their lives all the time. Sandler summarily declares America the land of second chances and gives a man freedom from his misery — the result is an explosion of erotic orgies. While true to the dark fantasies and threatening realities of our times, it’s a complete failure in terms of plot and comic control of the situation. Every episode in the movie is understandable, but they collapse however you might try to assemble them. Sandler, though he doesn’t know it, needs a writer with a hard-headed respect for American moral conventions.

The third movie was the best and I don’t think we’ll see its like again. “Sandy Wexler,” not even noticed in the press, is the best, most earnest statement of our problems with celebrity worship these days. Sandy is a wannabe producer, fated to fail because he believes Hollywood’s beautiful lies. He treats people humanely and that makes him incompetent. As a result, he bears the burden of all our lies and tries to spare everyone else’s feelings, including his tormentors. He suffers for the vices of audiences who want glamour and talent who want evil handlers to deal with everything for them. You cannot have success worship without a success machine, and that runs on human victims. Sandy is the most sainted one of them.

The humanity of that suffering pays off in the comedy, but, apparently, not in reality. Sandler tried to show that there’s some good in Hollywood and that there’s some truth to the beautiful illusions, after all, and it could all work out if people learned about human dignity. He elicits a sadness and a sense of shame in the audience, and that prove his point, that we are tempted to hold normal people in contempt and that we know we should behave better.

Two more films will come to complete this deal, but I fear Sandler’s career is over. The audience doesn’t believe him anymore, to their detriment. I think it’s time, therefore, to reveal his secrets. The success of his comedy, concealed in vulgarity and pretended idiocy, depends on a sense of grace. There is always the faint, but unmistakable trace of divine favor about the heroes he portrays.

They first win our hearts and have us honestly hope they succeed, which turns out to be good for all of us. They then also humble us, because they rely on a goodness that we know we cannot entirely live up to. Ultimately, they are not about comedy, but about providence. We might get rid of Sandler, but we will need his understanding of providence again, or else our entertainment will turn to despair.

Titus Techera is a graduate student in political science and liberal arts, a Publius fellow, and a roving writer for Ricochet and National Review Online.

Arizona Parents And Taxpayers Aren’t Pleased With Striking Teachers Ditching School For 6 Days

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey agreed to meet protestors’ primary demand before the walkout even began. So is the teacher strike really interested in achieving its stated objectives?

By M. Adrian Norman

4, 2018

May

On April 19, Arizona teachers voted to walk out of classrooms to demand high salaries. Organizers from Arizona Educators United, the activist group pushing for raises said the primary reasons for launching the protest are, “drastically underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms, crumbling infrastructure and low wages for educators.” They went on to say the “#RedforED movement has provided educators the opportunity to voice what action they want to take in an historic statewide vote.”

But that vote was not on a statewide ballot during an election and not all residents of Arizona support this movement. The walkouts, which continued for six consecutive school days, are hurting kids and local communities.

I wanted to get a better understanding of this issue, so I began doing some research and talking to affected (actually, disaffected) folks. What I’ve learned has taken me further than I expected. Several parents pointed out that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey had agreed to meet protestors’ primary demand before the walkout even began. So is this movement really interested in achieving its stated objectives or in something else?

In a May 1 post on Red For Ed’s official Facebook page, Arizona parent Andrew Sands commented, “Ducey not only accepted, but surpassed the Red for Ed demands before your strike started. Your irresponsible actions have prompted my wife and I to remove our children from public schools to place them in charter schools.”

CNN reported that Ducey offered 20 percent pay raises the protesters demanded, through a 9 percent increase “in the 2018 school year, then another 5% for the next two years, which would boost the average salary to $58,130 from the current $48,372 by 2020.”

Other Public Schools Perform Better with Less Money

Arizona charter schools, which are independent public schools run by boards instead of by school districts, greatly outperform their public school counterparts and at a much cheaper cost per student. Why spend even more money on public schools, when the results are lagging behind school systems that top national rankings?

For example, the latest national test scores show that 67 percent of eighth-grade students in American public schools are not proficient in math. However, Arizona charter schools rank No. 1 in the country for eighth-grade math performance, while Arizona public schools barely rank above the middle. Discrepancies like this don’t make parents and state residents excited about pumping more money into the public school system, when such results are being obtained for far less money.

I reached out to a local parent, who is also a teacher within the Arizona public school system. Sharon (whose name was changed for this article at her request, due to fear of reprisals) first shared an article that laid out protesters’ five demands:

- 20 percent salary increase

- Restore education funding to 2008 levels

- Competitive pay for all education support staff

- Permanent salary including annual raises

- No new tax cuts

“This is what they are demanding. Ducey agreed to [the] raise and they still went on to strike,” she said. “I voted against striking and am completely opposed to it.”

I mentioned that demands for things like restoring funding to 2008 levels, annual raises and no new tax cuts seemed untenable. She said, “As a teacher, I am personally embarrassed. We signed our contracts, there has to be a better way than stomping feet and leaving kids home from school. I agreed to my salary for the year, as did all those who are marching.”

Sharon noted the protesters are making financial comparisons to other states that have high taxes and higher costs of living: “Things were way worse here during the entire Obama admin [sic] and no strikes.”

One of the biggest talking points the marchers used is that Arizona spends $23,441 per inmate per year, but only $3,573 per student, Sharon noted. But it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, because the expenditure for inmates covers costs for 24/7 needs for 365 days per year, versus eight hours per day for 180 school days for students. Also, that $3,573 figure is only what the state of Arizona spends on public schools. Local districts and the federal government also fund Arizona public schools, like all the nation’s public schools, such that Arizona’s average per-pupil tax expenditure per year is approximately $11,000, according to federal data.

Another related item she mentioned is that many teachers in Arizona support open borders. Yet, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, as of 2010, illegal immigrants took $1.6 billion from Arizona’s education system. Court rulings have required U.S. public schools to educate foreign citizens who are inside the United States. As recently as 2017 the overall cost of illegal immigration to Arizona taxpayers was $2.3 billion. Nationally, on average, total state educational expenditures for illegal immigrants top $44 billion.

Those numbers represent $1.6 billion that could be spent on the very things Arizona teachers are protesting, without having to increase taxes or pull money from other state programs.

“If someone can provide me with a comprehensive budget that shows how this will work for AZ, I will consider supporting it,” Sharon said, when asked about the immigration numbers. “As of now, I haven’t been able to find anyone even trying to do that. They just want hundreds of millions of dollars, and they want it now.”

‘You Lost Me When Kids Paid the Price’

Rachel Cardon Turley posted on Facebook about her son’s calculus teacher, who has used his own money to rent a room off campus to keep teaching his students so they can perform well on exams that can help them gain college credit for high school classes.

‘You lost me when you said ‘it’s for the kids’ and now kids are paying the price.’

“I’d like to give a public shout out to a teacher who truly deserves a raise!” she wrote. “Mr. P” “hasn’t walked out on his students, their parents, or his contract, and is doing his job to the best of his ability until it’s over.”

She went on to say, “Teachers should be paid more and the education budget should be a priority, but timing is everything…I probably would’ve joined the movement after teachers fulfilled their contracts that they agreeably signed for this school year and then fought for more pay before signing next year’s contract. But, you lost me when you said ‘it’s for the kids’ and now kids are paying the price.”

If these weren’t enough reasons to re-consider any support of the Red for Ed movement, local news outlet Arizona Central just published a story highlighting an unexpected and significant effect. Local blood banks report the school closures are harming their supply, because high schoolers are the top blood donors in Arizona.

The article went on to mention that Arizona blood banks must take in around 500 donors daily to keep supplies constant. Officials estimate they will lose 1,200 if the walkout continues all week, which is approximately a 2.5-day supply for the state.

More Money Into a Broken System Isn’t the Answer

Most people seem to support the general idea of higher teacher pay. However, most people do not like the way protesters are forcing this issue on kids, parents, and taxpayers. Six days off has meant parents having to miss work, and students missing preparations for critical college exams. Additionally, missed days will likely be added to the end of the school year, forcing families to change more plans, such as vacation plans, which could get costly if there are re-booking fees and the like.

Arizona teachers want to be paid more. But those teachers do not perform as well as other teachers who are in charter schools that spend far less money. The state has billions of extra dollars available, but is currently allocating it to illegal immigrants—who shouldn’t even be receiving public funds. And the burden to families and unintended consequences of teachers walking out on contracts they willingly signed makes this movement nearly impossible to support, for me and for many others.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I know what it isn’t: throwing more money into a completely broken system.

M. Adrian Norman is the founder of the political and current events website www.rightofcenterblog.com. He graduated from The Ohio State University with a degree in journalism/public relations. You can reach him daily on Twitter: @madriannorman.

How To Make A Caring And Critical Assessment Of Pope Francis

A new collection of essays edited by Robert Whaples, 'Pope Francis and the Caring Society,' offers up illuminating and respectful critiques of Pope Francis' attitudes toward capitalism.

By Luma Simms

4, 2018

May

The Roman Catholic Church, a “family of families,” according to Pope Francis, has since the beginning of Christianity proposed to the world a model for a healthy human society. These suggestions to the world at large on what makes for a good and flourishing society are based on biblical principles and derived from Caritas, or charity (Matthew 22:36-40). This is the most important point about Catholic social doctrine. Without it being rooted in the scriptures and in biblical faith, it collapses to sociological concepts.

Briefly, the Catholic Church’s social teaching can be encapsulated thus: All human beings are created by God in his image and therefore intrinsically have dignity, rights, and responsibilities. Out of this first principle comes the second—the common good—which teaches that as a society we have a responsibility to all strive toward the good of all people and of the whole person (morally, socially, and physically). Tied to the first two principles is the third, subsidiarity, that teaches the importance of intermediate social entities—the family, churches, and a variety of groups and associations. The first three principles lead us to solidarity—given our created and social nature, God calls us to the moral virtue of unity.

These teachings lived in the stream of Catholic thought since Jesus told his disciples to love God and neighbor, forgive their enemies, pay their taxes, and so on. Commandments are nothing without their foundation in the Judaeo-Christian God and in the vertical relationship the believer has with him.

The dignity and rights of people, the mandate by Jesus to love our neighbor, the primary importance of the family and civil society, and the prayer by Jesus to be united by love, took a while to work themselves out in word and deed in the history of mankind. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” brought out these beliefs and ideas from the treasury of Catholic thinking and set them down as principles.

Out of this encyclical and other encyclicals that followed, Leo XIII and the popes who succeeded him articulated what it would look like for people to live in a way that maximizes justice and peace in the world—not with a utopian vision, but one grounded in the reality of Christian anthropology, that man’s mind is darkened and his will is weak. With each encyclical the popes addressed the social systems of their time. That is, they took these principles and applied them to what was going on in the world socially, politically, and economically. The application is not static, but changes as human society and technology change.

Everything Is Tethered

These doctrines on human dignity and the common good created a body of work known today as the social teaching of the Catholic Church. That is, it is teaching on how we should live in society—a society of people who may not have the same beliefs as those receiving the teaching.

A new collection of essays, Pope Francis and the Caring Society, edited by Robert Whaples with a forward by Michael Novak, comes with several pages of enthusiastic endorsements. It takes up what Pope Francis has taught in “Evangelii Gaudium” and “Laudato Si” on these issues and how his ideas fit within the overall framework of the Catholic Church. It is a well-balanced treatment by authors who are neither sycophants nor shrill opponents. What all the authors share is the idea that “Christian teaching has always been that God made people to have an infinite desire for Him, not to have an insatiable desire for the things of this world.”

Catholic social doctrine teaches that salvation is a restoration that cannot be reduced to just saving souls from hell. Neither does it teach that concentrating merely on the material well-being of mankind we can bring about peace and justice. The Catholic church understands that man’s greatest poverty is spiritual, and that salvation is integral; it is personal and social, material and spiritual, historical and transcendent. Catholic social doctrine understands that transforming hearts will transform society. Everything is tethered.

The authors of the essays in Pope Francis and the Caring Society understand Catholic social doctrine well. Here they attempt to understand and interpret the current pope in light of all that has already been articulated by the church. They are economists, theologians, historians; with expertise and irenic engagement, they support Pope Francis’ call to care for the poor, the marginalized, and the environment.

They do not shrink from discussions of wealth inequality, consumerism, oligarchy, crony capitalism, greed, and the plundering of the environment. But they also engage the pope critically, especially on the questions of capitalism and redistributive socialism. They do not begrudge crediting him when he is right, nor do they hesitate from a healthy critique of his understanding of the market.

To Move the Heart

The mind is conditioned by circumstances, and Pope Francis was shaped by his social, economic, and political milieu in Peronian Argentina. Samuel Gregg, in his essay, does a fine job expounding on that history. Authors Andrew Yuengert, Gabriel Martinez, Lawrence McQuillan, and Hayeon Carol Park are unrelenting and evenhanded in their critique of both our current economic problems, how capitalism has done and can do damage when not bounded by a moral society (as both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI had asserted), and on Pope Francis’s sometimes ill-informed views on wealth creation.

A. M. C. Waterman and Philip Booth tackle property rights and the environment. Allen Carlson discusses the micro-economy of the family. And Robert Murphy concludes with an exhortation: We can better attain a caring society not only when the world heeds the call of the church to live in line with the principles of the church’s social doctrine, but also when the church heeds professionals and improves its technical understanding on the issues about which it makes proclamations.

The book well deserves the praise it has received, for its tone and evenhandedness, for its expertise on the subject, for its critiques and exhortations, and for history and economic lessons.

Russell Hittinger wrote: “It is hard to interpret Francis with confidence. Evangelii Gaudium and Laudato Si evince a prophetic and poetic and rhetorical ambience that is unique to him. That ambience is meant to move the heart. It is neither philosophy nor policy.” The authors of the essays in Pope Francis and the Caring Society read less poetry and more policy suggestions from Pope Francis. We should do both—Catholic social teaching calls the faithful to both—the transformation of the heart which then transforms the world.

Luma Simms is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She writes on culture, family, philosophy, politics, religion, and the life and thought of immigrants. Her work has appeared at First Things Magazine, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @lumasimmsEPPC.

Dear Roman Catholics: Let’s Let The Megachurches Keep Their Rock Concerts, Okay?

Aye carumba! Someone in the ‘70s slipped something illicit in the chalice, and the flashbacks today for Roman Catholics like me are fierce.

By Bruce Edward Walker

4, 2018

May

My parish church has been hijacked. What once was a place of quiet devotion with the exception of a decade or so of banal Saturday evening guitar Masses is now a Broadway-musical venue.

In yet another misguided Roman Catholic strategy to bring in the kids and the adults who never stopped thinking like kids, my former mid-Michigan parish is hosting “The Cross and the Light” nondenominational multimedia extravaganza. In the church the pews will be rocking. All the altar’s a stage, doncha know. Rock’n’roll!

To quote Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” libretto: “Don’t you get me wrong,” I enjoy pop and rock music, and have been known to write and speak extensively on both genres in this real estate and elsewhere. Furthermore, you couldn’t grow up Roman Catholic in the 1970s without a trusty copy of “Godspell” and the aforementioned Rice collaboration near the turntable in catechism classes.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the “JCS” live network performance on Easter Sunday. In fact, I thought it rocked out magnificently. But, then, I watched it on television in my living room. Afterwards, I even watched the “Mr. Show” parody, “Jeepers Creepers Semi-Star.”

Heck, I’ll even go so far as to admit I was president of my Catholic high-school student council. When tasked to plan the first student Mass of the school year in 1976, I brought in my friend’s stereo and set it up in the back, speakers aimed toward the altar. During the processional, Rev. John and I walked up the center aisle while George Harrison and Eric Clapton tag-teamed their guitars on “My Sweet Lord.”

As much as I admired John, he wasn’t much for adult supervision, even allowing me to pepper the remainder of the Mass with Harrison’s “What Is Life,” Blind Faith’s “Presence of the Lord,” and the Guess Who’s “Share the Land.” It was John’s copy of Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” that I borrowed. I had wanted to use “The Concert for Bangladesh” version of “My Sweet Lord,” but John insisted on the studio version instead.

Suffice it to say, however, Sister Euphemia was aghast. When I matured more fully a few years later, I was inclined to agree with her. The Mass wasn’t supposed to be about celebrating what I assumed was my impeccable but hardly eclectic musical tastes in the late 1970s. Perhaps not surprisingly, poor faith formation was pervasive in that era. Someone wrote a “hep-cat” version of the Bible titled “God Is for Real, Man” that a grade-school nun taught from.

Even “Kumbaya” became a staple of those guitar Masses disparaged above. Cute girls sporting the latest leg-warmer chic performed the liturgical boogie. Don’t even get me started on other apparel worn to Mass—short shorts, blue jeans, and even sweatpants are today the norm rather than the exception. Perhaps some think athletic and work clothing are appropriate when sweatin’ to the sacraments. Aye carumba! Someone in the ‘70s slipped something illicit in the chalice, and the flashbacks today are fierce.

Now casual-slob couture has invaded the altar. “The Cross and the Light” program features attractive and presumably talented young performers wearing blue jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps. Say what you will about the blue jeans and T-shirts—ball caps? Worn in church? On the altar from whence my grandparents, father, aunts, uncles, and numerous friends were granted their respective final blessings and I was confirmed? Heaven forfend.

Shouldn’t the altar be where priests draw a distinct line between secular, ecumenical, and Roman Catholic cultures? Last time I checked, the altar of a Catholic church was specifically the domain of sacramental activities in the service of a sit-down, stand-up, or kneel meal. Now nondenominational worship is ordered like takeout and delivered to the altar itself rather than round back or left at the vestibule for the congregation’s synchronized-dance consumption.

Laser-light shows, video screens, thumpa-thumpa bass lines and lyrics randomly mentioning God and Jesus emotionally sung by Bono and Pentatonix wannabes sort of fall under the rubric of megachurches, do they not? It’s fine if you choose to attend a megachurch. I, on the other hand, do not. This cradle Catholic who spent more than his fair share of young adulthood wandering in the wilderness craves the real RC deal on altars over the boom-boom visuals, bang-bang beats, and theatrical preening of what passes elsewhere as contemporary worship.

As far as I know, no art museum installation has placed Michelangelo’s “Pieta” next to religious art by, say, Pablo Picasso. Works by both artists are fine, and some are even sublime, but would clash significantly in proximity. What are necessary to make Catholicism relevant to today’s young people aren’t theatrics and rock-show pyrotechnics but better Catholic spiritual formation and intellectual instruction.

By all means, enjoy “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “The Cross and the Light” elsewhere. Just not in RC churches and, for heaven’s sake, certainly not on the altar.

Bruce Edward Walker is a freelance writer for several free-market think tanks, including the Foundation for Economic Education, The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and the Heartland Institute. He also writes a weekly column for the mid-Michigan newspaper The Morning Sun.

Politicos Dogpile On Tom Price For Telling The Truth About Obamacare

4, 2018 By Christopher Jacobs

May

The Trump administration’s former Health and Human Services secretary could have changed his surname to Kinsley this week. Kinsley refers to columnist Michael, creator of the “Kinsley gaffe,” defined as “When a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

Price did just that on Tuesday, when in a speech he said provisions in the tax legislation effectively eliminating the individual mandate penalty “will actually harm the pool in the exchange market, because you’ll have individuals who are younger and healthier not participating in that market, and consequently, that drives up the cost for other folks within that market.”

To coin a phrase, “Well, duh.” Some of us came to that exact same conclusion months ago.

But the remarks prompted the typical Washington food fight. Democrats had a field day, claiming that Republicans “sabotaged” Obamacare, and that Price took a contrary position last year, when he said repealing the mandate would lower health costs.

Within 24 hours, Price attempted to “clarify” his original comments, in a statement saying that “repealing the individual mandate was exactly the right thing to do. Forcing Americans to buy something they don’t want undermines individual liberty as well as free markets.”

Ironically enough given the controversy, it’s relatively easy to reconcile both Price’s original Tuesday comments and his Wednesday statement, when taking his earlier comments in their full context.

On Tuesday, Price said repealing the individual mandate “may help, but it still is nibbling at the side.” Price is exactly right. Repealing the individual mandate, while keeping the rest of Obamacare in place, only undoes a portion of the law—and a relatively small portion at that.

Particularly when viewed from a freedom perspective, repealing the mandate seems quite insufficient. Republicans prevented some Americans from incurring tax penalties for buying a product they may not want or could not afford. But what does repealing the mandate do to give Americans the affirmative choice to buy a product they can afford? Absolutely nothing

Admittedly, the administration has put forward some helpful proposals to give consumers more choices. But any fix done solely through regulations by definition carries major limitations—most notably the fact that any future presidential administration could, and any Democratic administration likely will, attempt to undermine or reverse the executive actions.

Price’s Tuesday comments hit at the point I originally made last fall, when Congress considered the tax bill: Repealing the individual mandate while leaving the regulations in place will raise premiums. The only question is how much. Healthy individuals will have a greater reason to avoid costly Obamacare coverage, making the remaining population sicker and costlier. This dynamic also motivated Congress to consider a “stability” (i.e., bailout) bill earlier this year, which sought to blunt the effects of premium increases by throwing taxpayer money at the problem.

But as I have previously written, “It’s the regulations, stupid!” Throwing money at the problem won’t fix the underlying problem. Only fixing the problem will. Rather than criticizing Price for his candid and impolitic comments, Republicans would do better to go back and work to pass legislation repealing the Obamacare regulations—to give people the freedom to buy coverage they want, rather than just eliminating penalties for people who refuse to buy coverage they don’t need or can’t afford.

Springfield Armory Severs Ties With Dick’s Sporting Goods Over Gun Control Lobbying

3, 2018 By Sean Davis

May

Springfield Armory, a major manufacturer of handguns and rifles, announced on Thursday that it was severing all ties with Dick’s Sporting Goods following reports that the retailer had retained three lobbyists to push Congress to restrict the Second Amendment. The hiring of multiple gun control lobbyists by Dick’s was first reported by The Federalist on Wednesday.

“Springfield Armory is severing ties with Dick’s Sporting Goods and its subsidiary, Field & Stream, in response to their hiring a group for anti-Second Amendment lobbying,” the maker of the popular XD, XDS, and XDm semi-automatic handgun lines wrote on its Facebook page. “This latest action follows Dick’s Sporting Goods’ decision to remove and destroy all modern sporting rifles (MSR) from their inventory.”

“In addition, they have denied Second Amendment rights to Americans under the age of 21. We at Springfield Armory believe that all law abiding American citizens of adult age are guaranteed this sacred right under our Constitution.”

The hiring of multiple lobbyists to focus exclusively on gun control followed announcements by Dick’s that it would not only stop selling modern sporting rifles, but that it would entirely destroy its existing inventory of those rifles rather than sell them back to the manufacturers. An investigation by The Federalist, however, suggests that the actions of Dick’s Sporting Goods, which also owns Field & Stream stores throughout the country, may not match the corporation’s rhetoric.

Calls to nearly half a dozen Field & Stream stores throughout the country confirmed that the retailer is still actively selling the popular Ruger Mini-14, a semi-automatic rifle that is chambered in 5.56/.223, despite the new policy from Dick’s banning the sales of such rifles. Multiple stores, which are subsidiaries of Dick’s, reported that they had the rifle in stock, while others expressed a willingness to special order the rifle despite not having one currently on the shelves. The rifle retails for approximately $900.

Springfield is the first major gunmaker to publicly sever all ties with Dick’s over its anti-Second Amendment stance.

“It is clear where Dick’s Sporting Goods and its subsidiary, Field & Stream, stand on the Second Amendment, and we want to be clear about our message in response,” the company wrote. “At Springfield Armory, we believe in the rights and principles fought for and secured by American patriots and our founding forefathers, without question.”

“We will not accept Dick’s Sporting Goods’ continued attempts to deny Second Amendment freedoms to our fellow Americans,” Springfield concluded.

Springfield Armory was founded by order of George Washington in 1777 to store artillery and ammo to help Americans fight for independence in the Revolutionary War. Springfield Armory manufactured its first guns in 1794, and its name was eventually licensed for private use in 1974 after the U.S. government officially closed the armory six years earlier.

Amazon Boots Christian Nonprofit From Donations Program Because Of SPLC’s ‘Hate List’

3, 2018 By Bre Payton

May

A non-profit, public interest law firm which focuses on religious freedom issues has been booted from AmazonSmile, after the Southern Poverty Law Center deemed the law firm a “hate group.”

In a statement released Thursday, Alliance for Defending Freedom President Michael Farris said the law firm has been excluded from the retail giant’s program, which donates a small portion of purchases to the nonprofit of the customer’s choice. Farris said the firm’s exclusion is the result of Amazon’s reliance upon SPLC, an organization that has long been regarded as a glorified direct-mail scam that profits from hate-mongering.

“If you are going to rely on a discredited partisan organization like the SPLC to determine who is eligible to participate in AmazonSmile, you should disclose that in your policy and to your customers,” Farris wrote in a letter to the retail giant. “Your customers have a right to know that you’ve placed such an organization as the gatekeeper to participation in a charitable program.”

SPLC has come under fire for its shady financial practices — which includes shuttling millions of dollars to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Tax records show the organization has stockpiled nearly a half a billion dollars in assets, which spends more money on fundraising than it does actual legal work. The organization, which is famous for it’s “hate list” which targets legitimate conservative or religious groups by including them on a map alongside white supremacists and other extremist groups. SPLC’s hate list inspired a gunman to shoot a guard at the Family Research Council in 2013 with the intention to kill as many people as possible after the Christian organization found itself on the infamous list.

ADF, which is currently representing Jack Philips of Masterpiece Cakeshop before the Supreme Court, has reached out to the retailer in hopes that the firm can be re-enlisted in it’s program. While ADF is on the outs, Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, is an eligible AmazonSmile recipient.

Washington Post ‘Fact Check’ On James Clapper’s Leaks Ignores Basic Facts

The Washington Post's attempt to exonerate James Clapper from the charge of leaking ignores basic facts, common sense, and even an acknowledgement from House Democrats that he leaked to CNN while still in government.

By Sean Davis

3, 2018

May

Following revelations within a declassified congressional report last week that former intel chief James Clapper leaked information related to the infamous Steele dossier to CNN and other journalists, the Washington Post fact checker on Thursday claimed that the findings against Clapper were “unsupported” by the evidence. To the contrary, the evidence provided in both the full House Intelligence Committee report and the committee Democrats’ response to it makes clear that Clapper, despite initially denying he talked to any journalists regarding the dossier, did admit to leaking information.

House Democrats acknowledge in their own report that Clapper spoke with CNN while Clapper was still officially serving in the U.S. government as director of national intelligence.

“Evaluated in context, Clapper denied leaking classified information, while acknowledging that, as DNI, he engaged in legitimate discussion of unclassified, non-intelligence information with Tapper,” committee Democrats wrote in a report that was released the same day as the full committee’s declassified report on Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections. Some former officials maintain that because the dossier was jointly and secretly funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and was therefore unclassified, discussing its contents — or high-level government conversations about them — with the media somehow did not constitute leaking.

The full intelligence committee made a similar finding about the substance of Clapper’s testimony.

“Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic,” the House report noted. “Clapper’s discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on ‘the Christopher Steele information,’ a two-page summary of which was ‘enclosed in’ the highly-classified version of the ICA,” or intelligence community assessment.

According to the Washington Post, however, Clapper didn’t leak anything to CNN in January of 2017. In order to support this assertion, the newspaper dismisses all of the documentary evidence in favor of…a statement to the paper from Clapper that he didn’t leak anything until May of 2017:

Clapper said the majority report “deliberately conflated” his interview to make it appear he had spoken to Tapper in January, but he insisted that was not the case.

“I did not leak the dossier” when he was in government, he said. “I didn’t talk out about it with the media.”

[…]

In light of Clapper’s statement that the first time he ever spoke to Tapper was in May 2017, this whole scenario falls apart. We would have preferred an on-the-record confirmation from CNN, but we understand the reluctance of news organizations to discuss source relationships.

But even if one does not think Clapper is a credible source because of his false testimony to Congress, a close reading of the House majority report and the minority document shows that Clapper never said he spoke to Tapper in January.

Again, this assertion flies in the face of not only the full committee’s findings, but also the findings of House Democrats, who wrote that Clapper did indeed communicate with CNN while he was still a top intel chief on the federal payroll.

The Washington Post also took issue with the full intelligence committee report’s finding, undisputed by the Democrats’ own report, that Clapper leaked information in early January of 2017 while he was still a government official. The timeline is important because those briefings — one for President Barack Obama on January 5 and one for President-elect Donald Trump on January 6 — were the “news hook” used by CNN to first report the existence of a dossier allegations against Trump passed around by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials. The full dossier was published by BuzzFeed minutes after CNN’s January 10 report revealing the dossier briefing, which served as a de facto validation of a dossier that had not been independently verified by either U.S. government officials or media companies which had been privately scrutinizing it for weeks.

A transcript of the congressional intelligence committee’s interview of Clapper makes clear that his eventual answers about his communications with journalists revolved around those briefings on January 5 and January 6:

HOUSE INTEL: Did you confirm or corroborate the contents of the dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper?

MR. CLAPPER: Well, by the time of that, they already knew about it. By the time it was — it was after — I don’t know exactly the sequence there, but it was pretty close to when we briefed it and when it was out all over the place. The media had it by the way. We were kind of behind the power curve, because the media, many media outlets that I understood had that, had the dossier for some time, as did people on the Hill.

The Washington Post claimed that “nowhere does Clapper place the date of speaking to Tapper as early January,” but this claim makes no sense given that Clapper himself said–in response to a specific question about his interaction with CNN–that it was “pretty close to when we briefed it[.]”

The dossier was briefed to Obama on January 5 and to Trump January 6, a time frame that people with access to a calendar might characterize as “early January.” The rest of Clapper’s answer to that particular question also makes clear that the time of the discussion was before the whole world knew the contents of the dossier. The document had been circulating among media organizations and various congressional offices for weeks if not months, but had not yet been published or broadcast by any news outlets.

Recall that according to former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey, the briefings of Obama and Trump were necessary because media organizations, including CNN, were in possession of the dossier and they felt Obama and Trump therefore needed to be made aware of its contents before they were made public. If the dossier had already been made public, then there would have been no need for Comey and Clapper to brief Trump on a document he would have already read about in the news. The time frame was clearly “early January” — around the briefings on January 5 and 6, but before the January 10 reports from CNN and BuzzFeed about the dossier.

“It’s obvious the Post not only didn’t read the full committee report, it didn’t read the transcript of Mr. Clapper’s answers, or the admission by House Democrats in their own report that Clapper talked to Tapper while in office,” a source familiar with Clapper’s testimony told The Federalist.

The weight of the public evidence makes clear that the Washington Post’s attempt to exonerate Clapper appears to be more of an effort at wish-casting than fact-checking. Recall that this is the same James Clapper who previously lied to Congress about whether the U.S. government was electronically spying on millions of Americans. Clapper later claimed that the question posed to him by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” — was a gotcha question akin to, “When did you stop beating your wife?”

At the end of its “fact check,” the Washington Post noted that it had graciously chosen not to award any Pinocchios — its standard measure of honesty provided at the end of its fact check pieces — “at the moment.” Instead, the paper urged Congress to “update and correct its report in light of this new information.”

It might be a good idea for the Washington Post to examine all the publicly available evidence and take its own advice.

Sean Davis is the co-founder of The Federalist.

Hollywood Excommunicates Roman Polanski 40 Years After Child Rape Conviction

3, 2018 By Bre Payton

May

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which doles out Oscar awards every year, finally expelled movie director Roman Polanski from its organization — 40 years after he admitted to raping a 13-year-old girl then fled the country. Way to go, Hollywood.

The Academy announced Thursday afternoon that Polanski, along with Bill Cosby — who was convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault last week — are no longer welcome in the elite group.

Polanski was convicted in 1978 of raping a child he had drugged. He's been a fugitive from justice for 40 years. Over that period of time, the Academy Awards nominated him three separate times for awards (he won in 2003). Way to take a stand, Hollywood. https://t.co/gA2KddbTKZ

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) May 3, 2018

On February 1, 1978, Polanski fled the United States after spending a 42-day stint behind bars because he feared the judge would toss out a plea deal giving him a lighter sentence for pleading guilty to statutory rape.

His accuser, who was 13 years old at the time, said Polanski gave her champagne and a Quaalude during a photoshoot she was modeling in before raping her while she pleaded with him to stop. Polanski has remained primarily in France and in other countries where he would not be extradited to the United States. He remains a fugitive of the law to this day. While he was hiding out in Europe, the Academy awarded Polanski from afar — by awarding him an Oscar in 2003 for his work as the director of “The Pianist.”

Last year, Hollywood was rocked with accusations of rampant sexual assault and sexual harassment when movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was brought to heel for allegedly assaulting, groping, and harassing dozens of women. Weinstein threatened to ruin these women’s careers if they came forward with his behavior.

The FBI Shouldn’t Be Above The Law Either

The DOJ isn't “independent." And no one, not even special counsels, should function without oversight.

By David Harsanyi

3, 2018

May

A number of people seem to be under the impression that investigating Donald Trump is the most vital project undertaken by this nation since the Founding. Perhaps. But their feelings shouldn’t override the Constitution. Because for all the principles allegedly being whittled away by this administration, its antagonists seem to be doing everything they can to keep pace.

For instance, while it might come as a surprise to many, the Justice Department is not an “independent” entity. Presumably those who work for the DOJ have fealty to law and justice first, yes, but they are subordinates, ultimately, of the president of the United States, who was elected legally and has the identical powers to Barack Obama or George W. Bush.

Or, in other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein doesn’t work for CNN personalities or Vox explainer writers. He works for Trump.

And while it might also come as a surprise to some people, Congress — a separate, co-equal branch of government, run, for the moment, by Republicans — is tasked with oversight of the executive branch, which includes the Justice Department. Now, you may deem them scandalously incompetent or hopelessly partisan, but it’s within the purview of a congressional committee to ask the FBI for documents pertaining to an ongoing investigation. They aren’t breaking the law or “extorting” anyone, as Rosenstein recently asserted, by asking for more transparency.

Yet, most Democrats (and Never Trumpers) have taken the exceptionally convenient position that not only shouldn’t the president (well, this president) have a say over the goings on at the Justice Department but that Congress (well, this congress) has no right to demand oversight, either. Most of the media frame their work accordingly, creating the impression the FBI doesn’t answer to anyone.

Fact is, Rosenstein has a habit of slow-walking documents to Congress that make the FBI look bad. This is a political consideration. The Deputy Attorney General is now refusing to hand over redacted documents that pertain to former Trump aide Michael Flynn’s statements about interacting with Russians. Will Flynn’s statements magically change if the public or Congress sees them? Rosenstein has yet to explain why he’s not cooperating with a congressional inquiry. Instead, he plays martyr to a friendly media.

Last time we went through this charade, in fact, Democrats and their allies were claiming that releasing congressional findings on alleged FBI abuses would be a reckless attack on the nation’s security. Whatever you make of the veracity of the claims in the Devin Nunes memo, this claim turned out to be untrue. We went through a similar circus with the release of the Comey memos, which ended up giving Americans more context to the endless leaks that have consumed news coverage for the past year and half.

The idea that partisans and journalists who’ve made a living using favorable leaks regarding the investigations into the Trump administration are suddenly concerned about the sanctity of a criminal investigation are ludicrous. Moreover, Congress, whether you like it or not, is also conducting an investigation. Let’s see more, not less.

Which bring me to special counsel Robert Mueller. There has been a continued effort in congress to pass a law insulating the special counsel, creating a super prosecutor with wide-ranging autonomy that allows him to investigate whatever he likes for as long as he likes. I’m not sure such a law would be constitutional, but it’s certainly an attack on the separation of powers.

Let’s face it, most Democrats or Republicans have acted in partisan ways during collusion investigation because much of it is a partisan concern. The only thing left is to try and save the already tattered process. Because by creating the impression that wholly constitutional actions are abuses, we are also creating precedents that undermine norms governing oversight.

Now, firing Mueller would almost surely have major political ramifications, giving Democrats fodder to seek impeachment without any proof of criminality, much less “collusion.” And considering the questions Mueller reportedly wants to ask Trump — a net-casting expedition that has almost nothing to do with collusion, the impetus for the investigation — to do so would probably be an act of self-destruction on the president’s part.

Or maybe, Mueller will uncover criminality. Maybe Trump will abuse his office in an effort to bury the investigation. If the House believes so, it can impeach the president. If the Senate believes so, it can remove him. If the Republicans believe it, they can nominate someone else. If the American people agree, they can elect another president. This is all proper. But changing how government works by effectively stripping embedded constitutionally oversights for political reasons is just another kind of corruption.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the forthcoming book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

Podcast: A New Era Of Public Opinion Polling, Data, And Market Research

3, 2018 By The Federalist Staff

May

SUBSCRIBE TO THE FEDERALIST RADIO HOUR HERE.

Michael Ramlet is the co-founder and CEO of Morning Consult, a technology and media company that is changing the way brands, companies, politicians, and celebrities can accurately monitor America’s public opinions.

Ramlet joins this episode of the Federalist Radio Hour to discuss what brands are learning through online surveys about consumer data and market research. For example, is a trending Twitter hashtag representative of consumer opinions?

“If you were in a communications role and you’re looking at Twitter data, you might think this is cataclysmic, when in fact, maybe it’s not,” he said. “It’s not a proxy for what people think.”

Listen to the full interview here:

Table of Contents

cameupwith

All articles

Fans Take On Marvel, DC, And The Comic Book Industry’s SJW Self-Destruction

Federal Judge Blasts Mueller: You Only Care About Getting Trump

National Shooting Sports Foundation Just Expelled Dick’s Sporting Goods Over Gun Control Lobbying

Rudy Giuliani Knows Exactly What He’s Doing

How California’s LGBT Therapy Ban Could Ban Christianity Itself

The Real Villain in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Is Overpopulation Panic

How For-Profit Universities’ Conversion To Nonprofits Will Up-End Higher Education

The Incel Movement Isn’t Really About Demanding A Right To Sex

China Is Guilty Of A Billion Times More Cultural Theft Than Some Kid In A Prom Dress

By ‘The Week Of,’ Adam Sandler’s Star Has Dimmed, Leaving A Vacuum In Comedy

Arizona Parents And Taxpayers Aren’t Pleased With Striking Teachers Ditching School For 6 Days

How To Make A Caring And Critical Assessment Of Pope Francis

Dear Roman Catholics: Let’s Let The Megachurches Keep Their Rock Concerts, Okay?

Politicos Dogpile On Tom Price For Telling The Truth About Obamacare

Springfield Armory Severs Ties With Dick’s Sporting Goods Over Gun Control Lobbying

Amazon Boots Christian Nonprofit From Donations Program Because Of SPLC’s ‘Hate List’

Washington Post ‘Fact Check’ On James Clapper’s Leaks Ignores Basic Facts

Hollywood Excommunicates Roman Polanski 40 Years After Child Rape Conviction

The FBI Shouldn’t Be Above The Law Either

Podcast: A New Era Of Public Opinion Polling, Data, And Market Research