Today’s News 12th December 2023

• Niall Ferguson: The Treason Of The Intellectuals
  Niall Ferguson: The Treason Of The Intellectuals

  Authored by Niall Ferguson via The Free Press,

  In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics. 

  Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

  A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.

  

  Students at a public speaking school in the lecture hall of Berlin’s Humboldt University, c. 1931. (Photo by bpk/Salomon/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

  For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism. 

  Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

  Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny. 

  I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.

  Just as disturbing as such incidents—and there are too many to recount—has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders. 

  Testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill showed that they had been well-briefed by the lawyers their universities retain for such occasions.

  They gave technically correct explanations of how First Amendment rules apply on their campuses—if they did apply. Yes, context matters. If all students did was chant “From the river to the sea,” that speech is protected, so long as there was no threat of violence or “discriminatory harassment.” 

  But the reason Claudine Gay’s carefully phrased answers on Tuesday infuriated her critics is not that they were technically incorrect, but that they were so clearly at odds with her record—specifically her record as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the years 2018–2022, when Harvard was sliding to the very bottom of the rankings for free speech at colleges. 

  The killing of George Floyd happened when Gay was dean. Six days after Floyd’s death, she published a statement on the subject that suggests she felt personally threatened by events in distant Minneapolis. Floyd’s death, she wrote, illustrated “the brutality of racist violence in this country” and gave her an “acute sense of vulnerability.” She was “reminded, again, how even our [i.e., black Americans’] most mundane activities, like running. . . can carry inordinate risk. At a moment when all I want to do is gather my teenage son into my arms, I am painfully aware of how little shelter that provides.” In nothing that Gay said last Tuesday did she seem aware that Jewish students might have felt the same way after October 7.

  In a memorandum to faculty on August 20, 2020, she wrote: “The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality.” Gay continued: “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. . . . I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.”

  As the great German sociologist Max Weber rightly argued in his 1917 essay on “Science as a Vocation,” political activism should not be permissible in a lecture hall “because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.” This was also the argument of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report that universities must “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”

  This separation between scholarship and politics has been entirely disregarded at the major American universities in recent years. Instead, our most elite schools have embraced the kind of “institutional change” that Gay has championed. Look where it has led us.

  *  *  *

  It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.

  A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.  

  Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project. 

  Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion. 

  Marianne Weber recalled how, in the wake of the 1918 Revolution, her husband Max had explained his theory of democracy to the former supreme military commander, General Erich Ludendorff: 

  Weber: Do you think that I regard the Schweinerei that we now have as democracy?

  Ludendorff: What is your idea of a democracy, then?

  Weber: In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now shut your mouths and obey me.” The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.

  Ludendorff: I should like such a “democracy.”

  Weber: Later, the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistakes—to the gallows with him!

  Rudy Koshar’s study of the university town of Marburg in Hesse illustrates the way this culture led German academia toward the Nazis. The mainly Protestant student fraternities already excluded Jews from membership before World War I. In March 1920, in the turbulent aftermath of the revolution that had overthrown the imperial regime and established the Weimar Republic, a student paramilitary group was involved in a murderous attack on Communist workers. In the national elections held four years later, the Völkisch-Sozialer Bloc—of which the early Nazi Party (the NSDAP) was a key part—won 17.7 percent of the Marburg vote.

  Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To middle-aged lawyers, Hitler was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome. 

  Even a man who considered himself a liberal, as Max Weber surely did, was susceptible to the allure of charismatic leadership when the fledgling democracy seemed so weak. Three years after Weber’s death in 1920, Germany was plunged into disastrous hyperinflation. For many German academics, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was a moment of national salvation.

  “Right down to the last, deepest fiber in myself, I belong to the Führer and his wonderful movement,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank in his diary after a concert he had attended with Hitler on February 10, 1937. “We are in truth God’s tool for the annihilation of the bad forces of the earth. We fight in God’s name against Jews and their Bolshevism. God protect us!” Such thoughts helped him and many other lawyers to come to terms with the systematic illegality that characterized the regime from the very outset.

  German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology. As early as 1920, the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published their Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, which sought to extrapolate from the annual cost of maintaining one “idiot” “the massive capital. . . being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes.”

  There is a clear line of continuity from this kind of analysis to the document found at the Schloss Hartheim asylum in 1945, which calculated that by 1951 the economic benefit of killing 70,273 mental patients—assuming an average daily outlay of 3.50 Reichsmarks and a life expectancy of ten years—would be 885,439,800 Reichsmarks. Many historians were little better, churning out tendentious historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe that implied massive population displacement, if not genocide.

  

  Students of the University of Berlin arrive at a book burning rally, 1933. (Photo via Getty Images)

  A critical factor in the decline and fall of the German universities was precisely that so many senior academics were Jews. For some, Hitler’s antisemitism was therefore—not unlike woke intersectionality in our own time—a career opportunity.  

  For German academics of Jewish heritage, particularly those who had married gentiles and converted to Christianity, it was disorienting. 

  The case of Victor Klemperer, a convert to Christianity married to a gentile, is illustrative. A veteran of World War I, Klemperer was appointed Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Dresden University of Technology in 1920. “I am nothing but a German or German European,” Klemperer wrote in his diary, one of the most illuminating testaments of the German Jewish nightmare. Throughout the 1930s, he maintained that it was the Nazis who were “un-German.” “I. . . feel shame for Germany,” he wrote after Hitler had come to power. “I have truly always felt German.”  

  Yet the atmosphere at German universities grew steadily more toxic even for the most assimilated of Jews.

  In April 1933, under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, all Jewish civil servants, including judges, were removed from office, followed a month later by university lecturers. Klemperer recorded his agonized reaction in his diary:

  March 10, 1933. . . . It is astounding how easily everything collapses. . . wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And with it, on streets and radio, never-ending propaganda. On Saturday. . . I heard a part of Hitler’s speech in Königsberg [the East Prussian university at which Immanuel Kant had spent his life]. . . I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling. . . . How long will I retain my professorship? 

  Klemperer managed to hang on to his chair for another two years. On May 2, 1935, however, the blow fell: 

  On Tuesday morning, without any previous notification—two sheets delivered by post. “On the basis of para 6 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service I have. . . recommended your dismissal.”. . . At first, I felt alternately dumb and slightly romantic; now there is only bitterness and wretchedness. 

  Five months later, to add insult to injury, he was barred from the university library reading room “as a non-Aryan.” What followed was a kind of relentless whittling away of his rights as a citizen. 

  The Nazis’ antisemitism led, of course, to one of the greatest brain drains in history. Over 200 of the country’s 800 Jewish professors departed, of whom twenty were Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein had already left in 1933 in disgust at Nazi attacks on his “Jewish physics.” The exodus quickened after the pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938. The principal beneficiaries of the Jewish brain drain were, of course, the universities of the United States.

  Yet for Klemperer, emigration—least of all to Palestine, then a British “mandate” but also the location of the “national home for the Jewish people” promised by the British government in 1917—was out of the question. It would have been an admission that the Nazis were right: that he was in fact a Jew, not a German. As he put it: “If specifically Jewish states are now to be set up. . . that would be letting the Nazis throw us back thousands of years. . . . The solution to the Jewish question can be found only in deliverance from those who have invented it.”

  It was this kind of reasoning that persuaded him and many other Jews to remain in Germany until it was no longer possible to get out. Some chose suicide—for example, the Marburg linguist Hermann Jacobsohn, who threw himself under a train. In the end, Klemperer avoided deportation to the death camps only because of the Royal Air Force bombing raid on Dresden in February 1945, which allowed him to shed his yellow star and lie low until the German surrender. 

  He remained in Dresden after the occupation of eastern Germany. It was not long before he began to notice resemblances between the language of the new Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic and the Third Reich. Like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, Klemperer understood that the totalitarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left had fundamentally similar characteristics. In particular, they loved to impose Newspeak on those they subjugated.

  *  *  *

  Non-Jewish German academia did not just follow Hitler down the path to hell. It led the way. A few examples will suffice. 

  SS Oberführer Konrad Meyer, a professor of agronomy at the University of Berlin, was one of the experts who helped devise Heinrich Himmler’s “General Plan East” (Generalplan Ost) which, in the expectation of victory over the Soviet Union, was supposed to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south. Meyer’s version proposed establishing three vast “marcher settlements” with around five million German settlers. The fate of the peoples currently living there would be either annihilation or ethnic cleansing.

  In 1940 a graduate student named Victor Scholz submitted a PhD thesis at the University of Breslau with the title “On the Possibilities of Recycling Gold from the Mouths of the Dead.”

  He had carried out his research under the supervision of Professor Herman Euler, dean of the Breslau Medical Faculty. 

  At Auschwitz, SS Gruppenführer Carl Clauberg, a professor of gynecology at Königsberg, sought to find the most efficient way to sterilize women.

  Among the techniques he experimented with was the injection, without anesthesia, of caustic substances into the uteruses of prisoners. 

  Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.

  A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. The fall from grace of the German universities was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel. He was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945.

  Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain “the German catastrophe” by arguing that excessive technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller. As a result, they had been unable to resist Hitler’s “mass Machiavellianism.” 

  The novelist Thomas Mann—who, unlike Meinecke, chose exile over complicity—was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in “Brother Hitler,” the German educated elite possessed a monstrous younger sibling, whose role was to articulate and authorize their darkest aspirations.

  

  A student at the University of Marburg, 1935. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

  The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear. In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, “speech crossed into conduct.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.

  The Holocaust remains an exceptional historical crime—distinct from other acts of organized lethal violence directed against other minorities—precisely because it was perpetrated by a highly sophisticated nation-state that had within its borders the world’s finest universities. That is why American universities cannot regard antisemitism as just another expression of “hate,” no different from, say, Islamophobia—a neologism that should not be mentioned in the same breath. That is why Claudine Gay’s double standards—with their implication that African Americans are somehow more deserving of protection than Jews—are so indefensible. 

  That is why rational minds recoil from her argument that antisemitism on the Harvard campus is tolerable so long as genocide is not being perpetrated.

  *  *  *

  Well, the backlash against our contemporary treason of the intellectuals has finally arrived. 

  Donors such as the chief executive of Apollo, Marc Rowan (a Penn graduate), Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman (Harvard), and Stone Ridge founder Ross Stevens (Penn) have each made clear that their support will no longer be forthcoming for institutions run in this fashion.

  On Saturday, Penn president Liz Magill stepped down, along with the chair of the Penn board of trustees, Scott Bok. Perhaps others will follow. 

  Yet it will take a lot more than a few high-profile resignations to reform the culture of America’s elite universities. It is much too entrenched in multiple departments, all dominated by a tenured faculty, to say nothing of the armies of DEI and Title IX officers who seem, at some colleges, now to outnumber the undergraduates.

  In La trahison des clercs, Julien Benda accused the intellectuals of his time of dabbling in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions. . . owing to which men rise up against other men.” Today’s academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Benda condemned, insisting that they are on the left, whereas Benda’s targets were on the right. And yet, as Victor Klemperer came to understand after 1945, totalitarianism comes in two flavors, though the ingredients are the same.

  Only if the once-great American universities can reestablish—throughout their fabric—the separation of Wissenschaft from Politik can they be sure of avoiding the fate of Marburg and Königsberg.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 23:20

• End Of Western Dominance And Rise Of A Polycentric World, Lavrov Declares At Doha Forum
  End Of Western Dominance And Rise Of A Polycentric World, Lavrov Declares At Doha Forum

  Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, outlined a potential scenario in which a “polycentric order” emerges, characterized by multiple centers of power, marking the end of the West’s five-century period of global dominance. 

  Lavrov addressed the Doha Forum through a video feed on Sunday, with RT reporting his remarks as follows:

  “But I assume that you were discussing the multipolar world, which is emerging after 500 years of domination of what we call the ‘collective West.'” 

  He said the West’s hegemonic rule has been “based on a diverse history, including ruthless exploitation of peoples and territories of other countries.” 

  

  The foreign minister explained that the West continues to use its centuries-old globalization model to maintain its global empire. He pointed out, “However, other countries, using exactly the principles and instruments of the Western globalization, managed to beat the West on its own turf, building the economies on the basis of national sovereignty, on the basis of balance of interests with other countries.” 

  A polycentric order is much different from a “multipolar’ system. It’s a highly competitive environment where major powers possess the freedom to exert dominance over their neighbors. The world is becoming more chaotic, and that is why countries are ramping up military spending and securing energy sources. 

  In August, Lavrov told South Africa’s Ubuntu Magazine that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is becoming one of the pillars of a polycentric world order. 

  Back to Doha, where Lavrov said the emergence of a polycentric world order is “not the West’s liking.”

  Lavrov continued: “In order to suppress this kind of development,” the West has pivoted from globalization to a rules-based world order.

  “The rules were never published, were never even announced by anyone to anyone, and they are being applied depending on what exactly the West needs at a particular moment of modern history,” he noted.

  Lavrov added that “in various conflicts, which the West ignites all over the world,” including the one in Ukraine, it’s all about keeping the hegemony going. 

  “Is there a single place where the US intervened with military force, where life has become better? I think you know the answer,” Lavrov told the audience. 

  As the old order falls, the similarities between the late 1980s USSR and present-day USA are uncanny. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 23:00

• The Purges Are Ongoing
  The Purges Are Ongoing

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

  It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, peaceful and otherwise uneventful. Out of nowhere, the following people appeared on “Spaces,” an audible show on the app X (formerly Twitter). They are all speaking live with each other: Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Gen. Michael Flynn, with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and David Stockman listening in. Other people popped in and out.

  In real time, I saw 120K people listening, and millions total over two hours plus the archive.

  We keep hearing about the death of mainstream media and I’m starting to believe it. These people have all been targeted as enemies of the state and yet here they were, all having a civil conversation we could hear in all its raw authenticity.

  It was also a marvelous conversation. Mostly it revolved around how to defeat the globalist hegemon through free speech. Most of the people in this public room have been shut down, smeared, or otherwise silenced by the system. They are important people with huge followings and major impact but somebody somewhere decided that they cannot play a part in the formation of public life.

  And yet here they were speaking to hundreds of thousands of people in real time, apparently unannounced. They just showed up.

  Herein is the value of Elon’s platform that he purchased, not to make money but to give life to the idea of an open forum in times when the elites want anything but that. It was beautiful.

  I found Alex Jones particularly intriguing. I’ve never been a fan but that might be for cultural and aesthetic reasons more than anything else. In many ways, he has indeed been a prophet of our times. He has been forecasting the arrival of dark times for at least a decade.

  About five years ago when he was first shut down and censored, the comedian and podcaster Dave Rubin told me that we all know where this is headed. First they go after Alex Jones, who seems indefensible, but that is only to warm us all up to tolerating censorship. Next they go after others who we deem inadmissible to the public conversation. Eventually they come for us, and there is no one there to defend us.

  So he predicted and so it was.

  The purge of public life has been systematic and relentless for years now.

  

  There is always some excuse, some alleged infringement on the civic code of belief and conduct.

  The campaign begins and they are eventually burned at the stake like the witches at Salem. The puritanical impulse to drive the heretics from our lives to clean up the landscape still survives and thrives after all these years, despite every slogan about tolerance and diversity.

  Also over the weekend, I dealt with an unpleasant canceling myself.

  Brownstone Institute has a monthly supper club with speakers from many disciplines and points of view.

  For next month, we had invited Tiffany Justice, one of the founders of Moms for Liberty.

  

  Moms for Liberty founder Tiffany Justice speaks at the Republican Party of Florida Freedom Summit, in Kissimmee, Fla., on Nov. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

  This is an organization born of lockdowns that opposes school closures and favors parental rights. For some reason, the organization came to be targeted as bad… or something.

  We use the service called Eventbrite to take our tickets. Over the weekend, the company sent me the following note:

  “We have determined that your event is not permitted on the Eventbrite marketplace as it violates our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, with which all users agree to comply. Specifically, we do not allow content or events that—through on- or off-platform activity—discriminate against, harass, disparage, threaten, incite violence against, or otherwise target individuals or groups based on their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, veteran status, age, or disability. As a result, your event has been unpublished. Please be aware that severe or repeated violations of our guidelines may result in the suspension or termination of your Eventbrite account. We have refunded all attendees who purchased tickets to your event, if necessary.”

  Wow! Just like that, the service that claims to be for everyone has decided that our group cannot hear what Tiffany Justice has to say. It’s all crazy because ours is a very diverse supper club. I’ve never once polled people on their politics. So far as I know, it’s not even a topic of conversation. We are mostly interested in issues of science, civic life, community health, and so on. I invited Tiffany just to get her perspective. People are free to agree or disagree. That’s how the freedom of association works.

  But to Eventbrite, they seem to think we are all automatons who accept whatever we are told. We were about to listen to forbidden thoughts and so their platform had to intervene to protect us, as if we were children. It’s all so insulting and ridiculous. It’s also not good for their business, one might suppose.

  In any case, we scrambled overnight and implemented our own native system of taking tickets, so that we never have to rely on such third-party services again for this particular service. The meeting will go ahead, of course, without or without Eventbrite, so one wonders what the point of this particular purge really was.

  We have ample proof that most of these platforms are no longer independent actors. They are funded and controlled by third parties that respond to government priorities. I don’t have proof regarding Eventbrite but we’ve seen the same behavior from a dozen or more industry dominant platforms, so we can safely assume the same here.

  Fortunately, there is still something of a competitive marketplace out there, so we can exercise choice. But there’s no question that this too is on the chopping block. A point about industrial concentration is that it reduces the number of competitive options out there, allowing government a greater degree of control over commerce and therefore over individuals. It so happens that industry underwent an enormous consolidation over the last five years, to the point that the major government-connected firms control most of the market. This is true not just in digital commerce but also in groceries, home goods, and pharmaceuticals.

  Make no mistake: the goal is to continue the purge. It’s been ongoing since at least 2016. That was the point of the lockdowns, masks, and forced vaccination: to drive out of professional and media life those who dissent. It has only intensified since then. You are either with team Ruling Class or against it. Those on the team prove it through constant incantations of woke philosophy, while those against it are systematically smeared, canceled, and silenced.

  What can we do but resist? A major way is to use those platforms that tolerate dissent and eschew those that enforce the orthodoxy. This is the right of our times, and it is fundamentally about the right to disagree with the regime.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 22:40

• Mother Of Doomed Fetus Flees Texas For Abortion As State Supremes Rule Against Her
  Mother Of Doomed Fetus Flees Texas For Abortion As State Supremes Rule Against Her

  A pregnant woman in Texas whose child has a terminal birth defect has fled the state after a week of legal whiplash over whether she qualifies for an exception to the state’s abortion laws.

  

  Last Thursday, Kate Cox was granted permission to have an abortion by a state district court – the first time a pregnant woman has sought a court order for the procedure since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

  Hours later, however, Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) asked the state Supreme Court to immediately block the order. The Court agreed on an interim basis Friday night, followed by a 7-page ruling on Monday permanently denying Cox from having an abortion. Paxton went further following the Thursday ruling from District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, warning hospitals and physicians that the court’s order would not protect them from prosecution if they performed an abortion on Cox – a procedure which could carry up to a life sentence in prison.

  Their reasoning? While the Court acknowledged that Cox, 31, and her husband received “a tragic diagnosis,” Texas law only allows for an exception in the event that the mother “has a life-threatening physical condition,” making abortion necessary to save her life or to save her from “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” – which wasn’t asserted in her request.

  

  “The exception requires a doctor to decide whether Ms. Cox’s difficulties pose such risks,” the ruling continues. “(A doctor) asked a court to pre-authorize the abortion yet she could not, or at least did not, attest to the court that Ms. Cox’s condition poses the risks the exception requires.”

  The ruling also called on the state’s medical board to provide more guidance regarding the “medical emergency” exception at the heart of Cox’s case.

  Cox’s child, which is around 20 weeks old, was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, an almost always fatal chromosomal anomaly that leads to miscarriage, stillbirth or the death of the infant within hours, days or weeks after birth.

  On Monday, Nancy Northup – president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which has been representing Cox in the case, said that Cox has fled the state.

  “Kate’s case has shown the world that abortion bans are dangerous for pregnant people, and exceptions don’t work,” she said, adding “She desperately wanted to be able to get care where she lives and recover at home surrounded by family. While Kate had the ability to leave the state, most people do not, and a situation like this could be a death sentence.“

  “This past week of legal limbo has been hellish for Kate,” Northup continued. “Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer.

  “This is why judges and politicians should not be making health care decisions for pregnant people—they are not doctors.”

  The Center for Reproductive Rights is also representing a group of women and physicians before the Texas Supreme Court seeking clarity on the state’s law, while the state argues that it’s clear and adequate.

  Former President Donald Trump has warned that this issue will bite Republicans in the ass come 2024, and the optics of this one are a prime example.

  In September, Trump told an Iowa crowd:

  “In order to win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to properly talk about abortion,” he told an audience of some 2,000 potential voters, packed into a ballroom here.

  “This issue cost us unnecessarily but dearly in the midterms. It cost us dearly, really, and unnecessarily.”

  Trump said he would seek to bring together a bipartisan group to hear all sides of the debate. As Catherine Yang of the Epoch Times noted at the time;

  

  “We will agree to a number of weeks, which will be where both sides will be happy. We have to bring the country together on this issue.”

  15 Weeks?

  He claims the activists pushing for abortion on demand with no restrictions represent only an extreme view that even many pro-life Democrats are against.

  “Nobody wants to see five, six, seven, eight, nine months,” he said, adding that laws that allow mothers to terminate babies even after they have been delivered alive should be done away with.

  Asked whether he would sign a 15-week ban that made it to his desk, he said “no.”

  “Let me just tell you what I’d do. I’m going to come together with all groups, and we’re going to have something that’s acceptable,” he said. “What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months. You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy. Because 92 percent of the Democrats don’t want to see abortion after a certain period of time.”

  He said many people have offered up the “15-week” period for a ban, which is early into the second trimester, but he wouldn’t consider legislation without bringing more people into the room first.

  “I would sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years,” he said, declining to say whether he would support a federal ban.

  “I’m not going to say I would or I wouldn’t,” he said, adding that he was proud of the overturning of Roe v. Wade because it gave the power back to the states.

  “For 52 years, people including Democrats wanted it to go back to states so the states could make the right,” he said. “I did something that nobody thought was possible, and Roe v. Wade was terminated, [it] was put back to the states. Now, people, pro-lifers, have the right to negotiate for the first time.”

  He clarified that the consensus he hoped to bring could result in state-level action instead of a federal ban.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 22:00

• Ford's "Test For EV Adoption" Fails: Carmaker Slashes Production Plans For Electric F-150 In Half
  Ford’s “Test For EV Adoption” Fails: Carmaker Slashes Production Plans For Electric F-150 In Half

  Less than a week after Elon Musk unveiled his apocalypse-surviving, Porsche-out-accelerating, bulletproof CyberTruck, Ford’s EV effort is crashing on the Biden-administration ignited fire of unaffordability and high costs.

  

  Having signaled in October during its Q3 earnings call plans to “adjust” production of its all-electric vehicles and delay about $12 billion in investments due to softening demand for higher-priced premium electric vehicles; a memo to suppliers – which was viewed and reported first tonight by Automotive News – indicated plans beginning in January to produce an average of about 1,600 Lightning trucks a week at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan.

  Ford had planned for an annual production capacity of 150,000 Lightnings a year, or about 3,200 a week.

  That means its production target for 2024 has been halved.

  

  “We’ll continue to match production with customer demand,” a Ford spokeswoman said Monday.

  In May 2021, during a flashy introduction, Ford CEO Jim Farley told reporters that the electric F-150 could serve as a proxy for how mainstream buyers will accept battery power.

  “I am looking at this vehicle as a test for adoption for electric vehicles,” Farley said.

  “We should all watch very carefully how this does in the market.”

  It would appear Ford failed that test.

  Obviously, while this could be an idiosyncratic F-150 issue, it does not bode well for overall EV adoption… and along with it, the Biden administration’s plans to save the world.

  It appears Stephen Moore’s grim prediction in early November is coming true.

  The senior economist at FreedomWorks and former senior economic adviser to President Trump told Fox News in an interview.

  “I’m here to tell you, if these trends continue, we’re going to see the EV market become the next big flop because car buyers don’t want them.“

  “The obvious lesson for the industry: you can’t bribe Americans to buy cars they don’t want. Given the all-in approach mentality for EVs at Ford and GM, it’s clear that Detroit never got this message,” he wrote.

  President Biden has set a goal of 50% of all new vehicles by 2030 being either EVs or plug-in hybrids.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 21:40

• It's Not Too Early To Name The Decade
  It’s Not Too Early To Name The Decade

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

  The New Yorker is running a contest. What should we call our era? Some possible candidates: Terrible Twenties, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and the Assholocene. 

  Try as I might, I cannot understand the last one. Regardless, it’s absolutely the case that there has been a dramatic turning of events and our lives. It’s not just national. It’s global and devastating. 

  I’m going with the Terrible Twenties. 

  

  Everyone seems to agree that this moniker applies, regardless of class or political leanings. You can take your pick of the symptoms: ill-health, inflation, political division, censorship, overweening state power, shabby political candidates, war, crime, homelessness, financial strain, dependency, learning loss, suicides, excess deaths, shortened lifespans, lack of trust, demographic upheaval, the purge of dissent, the threat of authoritarianism, mass incompetence, spread of crazy ideologies, lack of civility, fake science, corruption at all levels, middle class disappearance, and on and on ad infinitum. 

  Put it all together and you have terrible times. 

  We seek out diversions and find them in trips, movies, arts, liquor and other substances, religion, and meditation. No matter what we do, once we come back from the temporary respite, there is no denying the awful reality all around us. And the more the terrible multiplies, cascades, and entrenches itself, the less obvious are solutions. The center stopped holding a few years ago, and is ever less in view. We have to struggle to remember the good old days of 2019. They seem like a dim memory. 

  Memory and nostalgia seems to be all we have anymore. We watch The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey with winsome reflection. Oppenheimer, Barbie, Napoleon, anything historical will do. We smile just to know that Dolly Parton and Cher are still performing because it gives us comfort. There’s always reruns of Seinfeld to bring us delight. Our streaming music services can bring back the golden age of rock or country or classical with the push of a button. We can examine old family photos and marvel at their smiles and the source. We can reflect on the good lives of our parents and grandparents. 

  Regardless, it all seems to be in the past, which seems always to compare favorably with the present. More profoundly, the past compares favorably to any imagined future we can conjure up. The Carousel of Progress at Disney World is like a macabre joke now. Indeed, the prophets of our future seem only to come up with dystopias: owning nothing, eating bugs, doing without, bikes over gas-powered cars, surveillance, cancellation, 15-minute cities, shot after shot for weird infections, Zoom-based communications, and the absence of elegance in dress, food, and travel, except for of course the elites who live like District One in The Hunger Games. 

  That’s because this hell that has been visited upon us is far worse than anything even the pessimists predicted in March 2020. We looked at the extreme policies of the time and forecasted unemployment, growing population despair, loss of confidence in public health and experts, as well as a long period of economic disruption. But we could not have known then that the two weeks would turn to two months and then to two years and longer. It was like society-wide torture under the thumb of autocratic bureaucracies who were merely making things up as they went along and justifying it all with duplicitous science and smiles made for social media. 

  The fakeness of everything was suddenly revealed to us, and everything we once trusted suddenly seemed to be part of the system. Where were the mayors and judges? They were scared. Where were the pastors, priests, and rabbis? They said the same things as the TV anchors and NPR. Where were the academics? They were too worried about promotion, tenure, and grant money to speak out. Where were the civil libertarians? They vanished, fearing departing too far from the mainstream consensus, however manufactured. 

  Everywhere we go and anything we do now involves something digital, and mostly it is about verifying who we are. We are scanned, QRed, tracked, traced, facially and retinally recognized, monitored, and uploaded to some great database somewhere, which is then deployed for purposes of which we don’t approve. 

  We can’t go anywhere without our monitoring devices once called phones. We cannot travel or even mail packages without a RealID. Every once in a while the government sends a loud squawk to our pockets so that we remember who is in charge. The demarcation between public and private is gone, and that applies to the sectors too: we no longer know for sure what is commerce and what is government. 

  The strangest feature of it all is the lack of honesty about it. Yes, the terrible truth about our times is now widely admitted. But the source of all the problems? Who did this to us and why? That’s all still taboo. There has been no open discussion about the lockdowns, the masking hoax, the failed shots, and the surveillance. Still less has there been open talk about the people and powers behind the entire fiasco that shattered everything we once took for granted about our rights and freedoms. Is it any wonder, really, that civil strife and even war are the result?

  We want to know who or what broke the system, but for answers we have to depend on those least likely to provide them. This is because the people who might otherwise tell us the truth all went along with the lies. They can think of no other solution than to keep telling them until we forget that we are entitled to the truth. This seems to apply to the whole of mainstream media, government, and tech. The experts who were in on it are hardly the ones to get us out of it. 

  We try to find the workaround as best we can. For a while, the boycotts against bad guys worked, until there became too many to remember. Pfizer and Bud Light, sure, plus Target, but now it is WalMart, Amazon, Facebook, Google, CVS, Eventbrite, CNN, and who knows who else. Are we supposed to be against Home Depot and Kroger too? Hard to remember. We can’t boycott everyone. 

  Our victories over this brand or that, this policy or that, a good court decision that loses on appeal, are regarded by the plotters as nothing but temporary setbacks. The terrible is like a great ooze that keeps flowing and filling up the world no matter how much we scrub, clean, and bail. 

  We want to support local restaurants – they were so victimized throughout – but it is too expensive. So we’ve rediscovered home cooking but even that gives us sticker shock at the grocery store. Plus, during the good times, everyone developed some kind of eating eccentricity. No meat, no carbs, no gluten, no fish (mercury), no seed oils, no corn syrup, nothing inorganic, plus every manner of religious restriction, but that doesn’t leave much to eat at all. We would hold a dinner party but there’s no way to get a consensus and our cooking skills have atrophied in any case. Becoming a home-based short-order chef is out of the question. 

  Those with younger kids are at a loss. People under 18 years old have been socialized to believe that the nutty world in which we live – masking up, closed schools, Zoom class, social media addiction, anger all around – is just the way the world is. We struggle to explain otherwise but we cannot do so with confidence because, after all, maybe this is indeed how the world is. And yet we cannot shake the reality that they know next to nothing about anything: history, civics, literature, much less anything truly technical. They never read books. None of their peers care either. Their career aspirations are to become an influencer, which leaves parents in the awkward position of recommending otherwise in times that seem to have changed so dramatically from when we grew up. 

  Study hard, work hard, tell the truth, save money, obey the rules: these were the old principles that made for a successful life. We knew them and practiced them and they worked. But do they even apply anymore? Fairness and merit seem to have gone out the window, having been replaced by privilege, position, identity, and victimization as a pathway toward gaining a voice and a foothold. Decorum and humility are being swamped by brutalism and belligerence. 

  The new generation is being told daily that objective reality is not even a thing. After all, if men can change their gender identity on a whim, and even references to “womens’ sports” are seen as hopelessly binary, what can we really count on as authentic, unchanging, and indisputably true? Is there really such a thing as “civilization” or is that a racist concept? Can we admire any of the Founding Fathers or is the very phrase offensive? Is democracy really better than other systems? What after all do we really mean by free speech? It’s all been thrown wide open. 

  You can add your own observations here but it seems obvious that the collapse has gone far further than anything even the prophets of 2020 foresaw. When governments shut our schools, businesses, churches, and gyms, under the guise of mastering the microbial kingdom, we knew for sure that hard times were ahead. But we had no idea how bad it would get. 

  Such “public health” measures were not even within the range of possibility outside the worst dystopian fiction. And yet it all happened in a flash, all with the assurance that The Science demanded it. None of the institutions on which we relied to stop such crazed experiments worked to stop it. The courts were closed, the traditions of liberty forgotten, the leadership of our institutions lacking in courage, and everyone and everything lost in a fog of disorientation and confusion. 

  The Victorian-era liberals warned us that civilization (there’s that word) is more fragile than we know. We have to believe in it and fight for it; otherwise it can be taken away in an instant. Once gone it is not easily restored. We are discovering this for ourselves today. We cry from the depths but the hole only becomes deeper and the orderly lives we took for granted become defined more by anomie and frightening surprise of the unthinkable. 

  Where is the hope? Where is the way out of this mess? 

  The traditional answer to these questions all revolve around seeking and telling the truth. That is surely not asking too much and yet it is the last thing we are getting today. What prevents us from hearing it? Too many are too invested in the lie to allow it to get a fair hearing. 

  The times are terrible not because of some impersonal forces of history as Hegel might have it, but because a small minority decided to play dangerous games with fundamental rights, liberties, and law. They broke the world and are now pillaging what’s left. It promises to stay broken and looted so long as the same people either gain the courage to admit wrongdoing or, like the decrepit old men who ruled the Soviet empire in its last days, they finally perish from the earth. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 21:20

• Raytheon's Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle Defeats Ballistic Missile in Test Over Pacific
  Raytheon’s Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle Defeats Ballistic Missile in Test Over Pacific

  Raytheon has successfully tested its “Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle,” designed to defend the US by intercepting and neutralizing long-range ballistic missiles in low-Earth orbit. 

  The kinetic-force weapon successfully destroyed an intermediate-range ballistic missile during a test in the Pacific region by the US Missile Defense Agency and the US Northern Command on Monday. 

  

  “This test demonstrates that the US ballistic missile defense system is operational, reliable, and ready to protect the country,” said Wes Kremer, president of Raytheon.

  Kremer continued, “Raytheon kill vehicles have now successfully completed nearly 50 space intercepts, which underscores our expertise and ability to design and develop these systems to defeat the evolving threat.”

  Also known as “EKV,” the weapon is an intercept component of the Ground-Based Interceptor and part of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System. It uses multi-color sensors, advanced computers, and rocket motors that help it maneuver in space to neutralize the threat. 

  Raytheon said it is currently developing advanced ballistic missile interceptors and kill vehicles that will protect the US and allies with “more robust missile defense capability against current and future threats.”

  There was no word if EKV could defend the US and its allies from Russian and Chinese hypersonic threats. 

  The US lags behind in the hypersonic race while other superpowers rapidly add these new weapons to the modern battlefield. 

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 21:00

• What In The World Has Happened To Our System Of Education?
  What In The World Has Happened To Our System Of Education?

  Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

  Our kids can’t really read very well. And it turns out that they aren’t very good at math either. 

  

  But those running our system of education continue to tell us that they are doing a wonderful job.  If they just had more funding, they insist, our test scores would go way up.  Of course that is complete and utter nonsense.  Our system of public eduction was a failure back when I was in school many years ago, and it is much worse now.  At this point, only about one-third of all U.S. students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades are proficient in reading…

  In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that approximately one-third of students in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades are proficient in reading. The situation even gets worse for certain groups such as people from a different race, older generations, and those who belong to low-income groups.

  So do you know what this means?

  It means that approximately two-thirds of all students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades are not proficient in reading.

  Wow, that is really terrible.

  And it is also being reported that 40 percent of our students “are essentially nonreaders”…

  Biennial testing through NAEP consistently shows that two thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency. An astounding 40 percent are essentially nonreaders. Most are taught through phonics—a system of instruction based on sounding out letters that is mandated in at least 32 states and the District of Columbia. The phonics method of converting each letter to a particular sound is totally unsuited to the English language. As but one example, e, the most common letter in print, has 11 different pronunciations (end, eat, vein, eye, etc.), including its role as the much-taught “silent e” (tape, cute, fine, etc.). This failure has been endemic from the early days of the country when Benjamin Franklin fought against phonics. The steady expansion of this mode of instruction will not fix the situation.

  Isn’t that great?

  We are headed for a future where approximately 40 percent of the entire population cannot even function in society.

  In some areas of the country it is even worse.

  In Chicago, only about one-sixth of all third graders are able to read at grade level…

  About one-sixth of all third-grade students in Chicago Public Schools can read at grade level. For low-income and minority students, the share of proficient readers is even lower.

  They tax the living daylights out of us to fund these public schools.

  So where is all of that money going?

  One activist that was asked about the current state of affairs openly admitted that “the kids can’t read”…

  “The kids can’t read – nobody wants to just say that,” said Kareem Weaver, an activist with the NAACP in Oakland, California, who has framed literacy as a civil rights issue.

  This is a national disgrace.

  Of course our kids are not too good at math either.

  In fact, U.S. students just established another all-time record low on an international exam…

  American students scored an all-time low in math on a major international exam, which provided the first comparison of global achievement since the pandemic radically changed education around the world.

  According to data released Tuesday, American 15-year-olds had a 13 point plunge out of 1000 on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exam, which was given last year to 620,000 students in 81 countries worldwide.

  Yay for our public schools!

  We are hitting levels that our students have never hit before!

  But even though our students can’t read, write or do math very well, they just keep getting moved through the system year after year.

  As long as you show up, you are going to pass.

  We have become a “participation trophy society” where nobody is ever supposed to fail or feel bad about themselves.

  This is true even at a formerly elite institution such as Yale University.  At this point, nearly 80 percent of the grades that are given to undergraduates at Yale fall within “the A-range”…

  A new report recently revealed that Yale University is apparently handing about grades in the A-range like they are candy. An estimated 78.97% of all the grades given to undergraduates at the prestigious university fell within the A-range.

  The surprising development has left both students and faculty alarmed that high grades appear to have lost their value, according to the New York Times. Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor, said: “When we act as though virtually everything that gets turned in is some kind of A — where A is supposedly meaning ‘excellent work’ — we are simply being dishonest to our students.”

  The grade report was put together by economics professor Ray Fair, who noted that the increase in grades started during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it has continued to rise since then, with students averaging a 3.70 GPA, up from 3.60 in 2013-2014. The details of the study were first shared with the Yale Daily News.

  How bad do you have to be in order to get a “B” at Yale?

  I would honestly like to know.

  Of course this isn’t just happening at Yale.

  All over the nation, “good grades” have essentially become meaningless at our major colleges and universities.

  Our kids have come to expect that “success” will just be handed to them, and as a result our system is pumping out millions of young adults that are just like this guy…

  On an episode of Caleb Hammer’s YouTube show Financial Audit, 41-year-old Brent of Auston, Texas, reveals he has no steady job, no savings and relies on his parents to pay rent. But he refuses to accept work that’s “beneath” him.

  “You’re being a baby,” Hammer told him after he confessed he turned down a job at a fast food restaurant. “Why will you not accept the jobs that you feel are slightly beneath you?”

  Our system of education is theoretically supposed to be preparing our kids to face the real world, and that just isn’t happening.

  The real world is not pleasant.

  It does not hand out participation trophies.

  In fact, there are times when the real world will pick you up and knock the breath out of you.

  But now we have vast hordes of young people that cannot deal with the real world, and they are completely and utterly unprepared to deal with the extremely uncertain future that our society is now facing.

  We don’t do our kids any favors by coddling them.

  They need to be challenged, and unfortunately our absolutely pathetic system of education is not challenging them at all.

  *  *  *

  Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 20:40

• Shocking Video Reveals Democrats Stuffed Nearly 3,000 Illegals Into Chicago Warehouse 
  Shocking Video Reveals Democrats Stuffed Nearly 3,000 Illegals Into Chicago Warehouse 

  A new video has surfaced on X showing the location of a warehouse in the Chicago metro area where nearly 3,000 illegal migrants have been packed into. This comes as the US southern border continues to spiral out of control as disastrous open border policies by the Biden administration have flooded major metro areas with hundreds of thousands of illegals, if not more. 

  “I honestly couldn’t believe it when I first heard it. 2700 illegals being housed in a warehouse in south Chicago (2241 S. Halsted St),” Ben Bergquam, a reporter for Real America’s Voice News, said in a post on X. 

  Bergquam continued, “People have no idea how bad this is going to get! The truth about the Democrat’s illegal invasion: drugs, prostitution, child trafficking, and modern-day slavery.” 

  I honestly couldn’t believe it when I first heard it. 2700 illegals being housed in a warehouse in south Chicago (2241 S. Halsted St). And this is only one of over 56 locations being used. People have no idea how bad this is going to get! The truth about the democrats illegal… pic.twitter.com/aO33dQNoDX

  — Ben Bergquam – Real America’s Voice (RAV-TV) News (@BenBergquam) December 11, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  In late September, local media CBS 2 reported that the 2241 S. Halsted St. warehouse would house upwards of 400 families with children, with plans to expand to 1,000. If Bergquam’s figures are correct, the warehouse is quickly running out of room. 

  Just last week, sources with the Customs and Border Protection confirmed to Fox News that Tuesday was the largest single-day illegal migrant encounter ever on the US-Mexico border. 

  The invasion continues… the Democrats are desperate to get as many illegals into the country before they lose power. pic.twitter.com/NSWW9WyPUC

  — @amuse (@amuse) December 7, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, since President Biden took office, there have been more than 9 million illegal entries into the US on the southern border. 

  Meanwhile, other failing progressive metro areas, like New York City, are being overrun by illegal migrants. 

  I’m in NYC this weekend, and seeing the illegal migrant crisis in person is absolutely ALARMING.

  They’re literally given THOUSANDS of dollars by taxpayers to just run amok through the city.

  BIDEN IS DOING NOTHING AT ALL TO FIX THIS! pic.twitter.com/iQXkT0wyJY

  — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 9, 2023

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  As NYC’s asylum seeker crisis worsens, the mercury dips and new shelter deadlines approach for the arrivals, advocates are worried migrants could face a long, cold winter.

  “This becomes even more of a life-and-death issue as the weather gets cold.”https://t.co/kpKR5G9y5N

  — New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) December 10, 2023

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  It’s not hard to recognize why Democrats are welcoming illegals with open arms ahead of the 2024 election cycle:

  

  And this. 

  NY Lawmaker Claims “Smoking Gun” In NYC Migrant Voter Fraud Scheme https://t.co/C6PvZt4ofy

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 4, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  While Democrats lose the black vote… 

  Democrats are focused on a new voting base coming over the southern border. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 20:20

• Elon Musk Says He Would Rather "Go To Prison" Than Restrict Free Speech On X
  Elon Musk Says He Would Rather “Go To Prison” Than Restrict Free Speech On X

  Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

  X owner Elon Musk declared during a Spaces discussion that he will never restrict free speech on the platform, no matter what entities pressure him to do so, and asserted that he would rather “go to prison” than allow it to happen.

  

  Musk’s comments came during a Spaces discussion, also featuring Alex Jones who Musk reinstated on the platform Sunday.

  Human Events editor Jack Posobiec asked Musk what would happen if the FBI or DHS “come to X and say ‘these posts need to be censored , this information needs to be censored.”

  Musk responded that the platform will remain “as transparent as possible,” adding “Basically we will see everything that is happening on the system and nothing will be hidden, that is the goal.”

  Musk added that “frankly if I think a government agency is breaking the law in their demands in the platform I would be prepared to go to prison personally if I think they are the ones breaking the law.”

  EXCLUSIVE: @elonmusk just confirmed to Human Events’ @JackPosobiec that he would be willing to go to jail rather than illegally censor users on X on behalf of the federal government. pic.twitter.com/VDZqks37nO

  — Human Events (@HumanEvents) December 10, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Elsewhere during the discussion, Musk explained that he reinstated Alex Jones because as a free speech absolutist he will not censor anyone on X if they have not broken the law.

  Here it is in its entirety:

  The full version of the 𝕏 Spaces https://t.co/yotiFLz51q

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  *  *  *

  Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 20:00

• What Strong Consumer: Hasbro Lays Off 20% Of Company On Plunging Toy Sales
  What Strong Consumer: Hasbro Lays Off 20% Of Company On Plunging Toy Sales

  There is the myth that the US consumer is strong (strip away inflation and you are at pre 2019-levels)…

  

  … that holiday spending was stellar (online was indeed a record, foot-traffic however which is the bulk of retail sales declined again), and that spending – despite continued economic headwinds and record prices – is strong.

  And then there is the reality that parents can no longer afford to buy presents for what is (or should be) most precious to them: their children. Take the news just out of the WSJ that toymaking giant Hasbro is laying off 1,100 workers, with CEO Chris Cocks citing weak toy sales and games that persisted into the critical holiday shopping period.

  

  The layoffs, which account for nearly 20% of Hasbro’s workforce, were noted in a Monday memo Cocks sent to employees, which was viewed by the Wall Street Journal.  The slump in sales came after sales hit “historic, pandemic-driven highs” melted into holiday season challenges which are expected to continue into next year.

  “The market headwinds we anticipated have proven to be stronger and more persistent than planned,” reads the memo. “While we’re confident in the future of Hasbro, the current environment demands that we do more.”

  The cuts will be completed in the next 18-24 months.

  Shares for Hasbro and Mattel fell 4% and 3%, respectively, in after-hours trading. Hasbro shares are down 20% this year, while Mattel stock is up 5.4%.

  The announcement, just two weeks before Christmas, comes as toy companies enter their busiest time of the year. About half of toy companies’ yearly sales come in the weeks leading up to the holiday, according to analysts, making the period a make-or-break stretch for manufacturers. -WSJ

  According to the report, Hasbro warned in October that they expected to see a 15% slump in sales this year, after previously forecasting a 3% to 5% decline. This came on the heels of posting its fourth-consecutive quarterly loss thanks to a 10% drop in Q3 sales. 

  Notable Hasbro brands include; Power Rangers, PJ Masks, GI Joe, Monopoly, Play-Doh, and Transformers.

  

  Outlier Barbie

  Mattel, maker of Barbie, had an understandably awesome Q3 thanks to the runaway success of the “Barbie” movie. The California-based toymaker which also owns the Hot Wheels brand and Polly Pocket toys expects 2023 sales to be flat vs. 2022, bucking forecasts for an industry-wide decline which has toymakers scrambling to manage bloated toy inventories and softer demand thanks to inflation.

  Sales of Barbie toys surged in the third quarter after the Barbie movie roped in over $1.4 billion worldwide at cinemas, according to Box Office Mojo. 

  Hasbro unveiled over a year ago that it planned to cut costs across its business to grow its profit. An earlier round of layoffs and the departure of operating chief Eric Nyman followed shortly after. -WSJ

  In August, Hasbro said it would sell its eOne film and entertainment wing to Lions Gate entertainment for around $500 million.

  The layoffs are expected to save around $100 million in annual costs, while the company said it expects to incur $40 million in severance-related expenses. Hasbro also has plans to vacate its Providence, RI office at the end of January 2025 when its lease is up. Employees from that location will be transferred to the company’s nearby Pawtucket RI headquarters.

  * * *

  Finally, going back to the topic of just how healthy is the US consumer, he are sharing the following snapshot from Goldman’s consumer specialist, Scott Feiler laying out what he views as a “slight sentiment change.”

  Quick Take:  Most of my conversations with consumer specialists from the last 6 weeks have been from those more optimistic on the group (top-line in November and strong margins), with that view having been rewarded. However, there were the hints at a slight change this week, with a lot of inbounds asking if the trade will run out of steam, with trends post Black Friday likely to ease again (WOOF hinted trends have resumed to pre-holiday levels after a brief surge), valuations now at more normal levels (after having been cheap) and a view the next couple weeks of data could show more of a temporary lull.

  Feiler notes that the bank’s Prime Brokerage echo this more guarded tone when approaching the market, with 5th straight week of selling. However, consumer discretionary flows do not back up the more guarded tone from my inbounds, with the sector leading the buying at GS for the 2nd straight week.
   
  A few quick points from the Goldman trader:

  Is the consumer still fine? It seems like the answer is yes, as we heard from many corporates at the GS Fins conference this week.  Some highlights about low-income underperformance, but the overall tone was quite strong.

  However, there does seem like there could be interest in taking chips off the table. Mixed commentary as we moved past the peak “optimistic” data points from the start of the holiday season and those who were out of consensus positive are finally beginning to question if the trade slows from here. Trading and PB flows no not reflect that though.

  While cyclicals continue to move to fresh positioning lows, consumer has seen a real uptick in buying (exhibit 1).

  Single stocks were net sold on the GS PB book for a 5th straight week, with single stock short flow increasing for a record 17th week in a row. While this was led by cyclicals, this was Energy and Fins stocks, not consumer discretionary, which saw the largest buying of any sub-sector for a 2nd straight week (Exhibit 2).

  

  More available to pro subs in the usual place.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 19:40

• Hunter Biden Files To Dismiss Gun Charges, Arguing "Vindictive Prosecution" In 1 Of 4 Motions
  Hunter Biden Files To Dismiss Gun Charges, Arguing “Vindictive Prosecution” In 1 Of 4 Motions

  Authored by Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times,

  Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, filed four separate motions on Monday to dismiss a case charging him with three gun-related crimes.

  

  Attorneys for Mr. Biden are arguing that the now-defunct plea bargain presented this summer nulled his gun charges in exchange for a guilty plea on tax misdemeanors, that special counsel David Weiss was “unlawfully appointed” to his position, and that the gun charges are unconstitutional. Lastly, he argued to dismiss on the basis of a “selective and vindictive prosecution.”

  The defense also filed a motion for a hearing for discovery, to argue some of these issues.

  In addition to the three gun crimes, Mr. Biden has been charged with nine tax crimes in California.

  Plea Deal

  Earlier on Monday, Abbe David Lowell, legal counsel for Mr. Biden, told MSNBC he believes the prosecution was politically motivated.

  “Are you asking whether he should have accountability for the mistakes he made while he was addicted? Sure he should. And if the U.S. attorney had followed through, and continued on what was supposed to happen in June, there would have been accountability,” Mr. Lowell said.

  He said Mr. Weiss should have accepted the plea deal.

  “Hunter was in court that day to have accountability and to show remorse and to take responsibility for his conduct,” Mr. Lowell said, accusing the prosecutors of backtracking “after seeing the criticism.”

  The plea bargain had been widely panned as a sweetheart deal by House Republicans, including several overseeing investigations into the Biden family’s financial dealings. During Mr. Biden’s initial arraignment in Delaware, the federal judge had questioned both parties about the terms, and the deal fell apart within minutes.

  Mr. Weiss has since pulled the case and deal, which Mr. Lowell argues is a violation.

  “In exchange for Mr. Biden giving up various rights—including his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent by agreeing to the Statement of Facts drafted by the prosecution and numerous restrictions on his liberty—the prosecution agreed to provide him immunity for any offense concerning his purchase of a firearm (among other offenses),” the first motion to dismiss reads.

  Mr. Weiss had argued that the deal was never formally entered into and no longer holds.

  On MSNBC, Mr. Lowell did not refute the tax evasion allegations, nor his client’s drug addiction during the period when he bought and owned a gun.

  Special Counsel Status

  Defense attorneys are also arguing that because Congress has not appropriated funds for Mr. Weiss as special counsel, he was “unlawfully appointed.”

  During U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement of Mr. Weiss’s special counsel status, he said Mr. Weiss would “also continue to serve as U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware.”

  This additionally violates Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations that require special counsels to be selected from outside the U.S. government, Mr. Biden’s attorneys argue, adding that “the Attorney General did not even select a Special Counsel from outside his own agency.”

  “Accordingly, the Indictment should be dismissed as without proper authority to have been sought and brought,” the motion reads.

  Mr. Weiss’s authority in the case has been under scrutiny, as whistleblowers told Congress earlier this year that the DOJ had slow-walked the investigation into Mr. Biden for political reasons, including not granting Mr. Weiss special counsel status.

  In Mr. Weiss’s own testimony before Congress, he confirmed that he did not have the authority needed to bring charges against Mr. Biden in California or Washington, D.C., only Delaware, but not that there had been an incident where he requested special counsel status and was refused.

  “Whatever caused Special Counsel Weiss to renege on the agreement he reached in this case and to then bring charges beyond the agreement, he filed this Indictment as an improperly appointed and funded Special Counsel,” the new motion reads.

  Unconstitutional?

  Mr. Lowell previously stated that he believed the gun case could be won on the merits, because a court has already found similar statutes unconstitutional.

  In the new motion to dismiss, defense attorneys argue the government is using “a rarely used statute,” one that prohibits “an unlawful user of a controlled substance” from owning a firearm, which was struck down earlier this year in the Fifth Circuit.

  Therefore, the charge is “baseless,” and moots another charge against Mr. Biden for saying he was not a drug user on a form he filled out when purchasing the gun.

  “Because persons protected by the Second Amendment can no longer be denied gun ownership due simply to past drug use—a practice inconsistent with this nation’s historical tradition on firearm regulation—any false statement by Mr. Biden concerning his status as having used a controlled substance no longer concerns ‘any fact material to the lawfulness of the sale’ of a firearm,” the motion reads.

  The decision referenced found barring drug users from being able to own a firearm a violation of the Second Amendment.

  Certain behaviors while intoxicated could be prohibited by laws, such as drunk driving and assault, but the framers of the Second Amendment were “well aware of the problems caused by intoxication” and left no historical precedent favoring the prohibition of gun ownership by those with “any history of ingesting intoxication substances,” like alcoholics.

  After the Fifth Circuit’s decision, another federal district court, the Third Circuit, issued a similar ruling, striking down a statute that prohibited anyone with a felony conviction from owning a firearm.

  Defense attorneys argue “there is no reason to believe” and no historical precedent to show that the Supreme Court will find the statute used to charge Mr. Biden “constitutional.”

  ‘Foil’ to Trump Investigation

  In a lengthy filing, defense attorneys accused the prosecution of bias against Mr. Biden.

  “This Indictment reflects a selective and vindictive prosecution of Mr. Biden and a breach of separation of powers,” the motion reads, arguing that the “evidence is on steroids.”

  They argued that Mr. Weiss “waited until after five years of a thorough and what was and must continue to be a very expensive” investigation that resulted in a plea deal reneged on the deal because he “drew a sharp rebuke from former President Trump (who appointed Mr. Weiss), extremist House Republicans, and the far-right media.”

  “They made it clear that they wanted Mr. Weiss to keep this litigation alive through the presidential election (regardless of merit) and for him to bring more serious charges as a foil for the investigations and prosecutions of former President Trump,” the motion reads.

  Attorneys for Mr. Biden have been sticking to the defense that the past plea bargain grants him immunity that still stands, and efforts to dismiss that are politically motivated.

  The facts did not change, they argued, only the political circumstances. Mr. Biden was previously charged with two misdemeanors, and is now facing 12 counts, misdemeanors and felonies both.

  The defense has also called for a hearing during which they plan to present evidence that the prosecution is politically motivated.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 19:20

• "We're Raising A Generation Of Complete F**king Pu$$ies" – Kid Rock & Carlson Crush Cancel Culture & Corporate America's Political Correctness
  “We’re Raising A Generation Of Complete F**king Pu$$ies” – Kid Rock & Carlson Crush Cancel Culture & Corporate America’s Political Correctness

  Kid Rock has morphed over the past few years from a famous musician to a cultural icon, unapologetically pro-America (‘Fuck yeah!’) and pro-Trump and that makes him a fascinating character to sit down with Tucker Carlson to discuss everything from cancel culture to his friendship with former President Trump and his hopes for a better America.

  

  Tucker Carlson starts by mentioning Kid Rock’s infamous “fuck Bud Light and fuck Anheuser Busch” video where he executes cases of beer with a Carbine in response to the anti-‘bro’, transgender marketing plan, bringing up the fact this helped to force the beer-maker to effectively apologize, sign a $100 million deal with the UFC and say ‘we’re sorry, we will get better’.

  “That seems like a win to me,” says Carlson. “I think it could be,” replies Kid Rock, “they deserved a black eye, they got one, they made a mistake.”

  “I know who my consumer is… I was doing a little marketing to my folks,” he adds.

  “That was spot on for me, but also a fun excuse to get my machine gun out and have some fun but also to make a statement like hey a lot of us aren’t cool with this.”

  Kid Rock them delves deeper into what went on at Anheuser Busch noting that “this kind of started I think I thought about is they moved part of their Corporate Offices from St Louis to New York City.”

  “… then they start hiring these Ivy League Progressive you know people to work for him who don’t know shitabout working-class people or Middle America in this country.”

  But Kid Rock wants them to be redeemed, suggesting later in the conversation a blue hat: “Make Bud Light Great Again”.

  “I think they got the message like hopefully other companies get it too…

  …but at the end of the day I don’t think the punishment that they’ve been getting at this point fits the crime..

  …”it’s like I would like to see people get us back on board and become bigger because that’s the America I want to live in.”

  The conversation then pivots to Donald Trump with whom Kid Rock says he has a close relationship and mutual understanding. Recounting a story of betting on the outcome of a UFC fight together, Kid Rock says:

  “I’ve never seen anybody wants to win for this country like that guy I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it in our lifetime to me is the greatest president we’ve had.”

  Carlson asked about Trump’s state of mind amid the constant lawfare and media abuse.

  “Is he pissed off, sure,” Kid Rock says, slamming the cases against him, especially the New York (Mar-a-Lago valuation) case which he calls “a freaking joke… there’s no crime there.. anyone who can’t see they are just fucking with him is just blind.”

  The discussion shifts naturally to broader cultural issues, with Kid Rock lambasting cancel culture and political correctness. He expresses frustration with the current societal climate, advocating for more open and honest communication:

  “Whatever happened to Sticks and Stones… yeah, you know everyone’s like: he teased me, I’m going to cancel you, and sue you, and I’m going to tell on you…” Kid Rock exclaims, pardoning his french with his host, “we’re raising a generation of fucking pussies.”

  But this can’t go on forever, Carlson says inquisitively. Kid Rock replies with some optimism:

  “naah, the pendulum always swings back.”

  The discussion concludes by touching on his upcoming tour and personal life, including his band’s diversity and his approach to various social issues.

  “We have white people, Hillbillies, we have black people, we have gay people, we got it all,” adding that “we all love each other and always have we accept that we’re all different and we’re all just cool.“

  Carlson asked Kid Rock for advice he would give young people today:

  “well number one work your ass off; and be good at what you do, be the best at it.. and that takes a lot of time… surround yourself with good people don’t hang out with Knuckleheads.”

  A good lesson for all of us.

  Watch the full interview below:

  Ep. 48 The Tucker Carlson Encounter: Kid Rock pic.twitter.com/g9wLg1zlvu

  — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 11, 2023

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 19:00

• Universities Better Get Ahead Of Surging Anti-Woke Backlash…
  Universities Better Get Ahead Of Surging Anti-Woke Backlash…

  Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.org,

  Universities better get ahead of surging anti-woke backlash. The University of Illinois should go first.

  The dam has finally burst.

  

  Most Americans of every political stripe gagged last week seeing three leading university presidents’ Congressional testimony on anti-semitism. After years of punishment and censorship of centrist and conservative viewpoints at their schools and others across America, none of the three could say that calls for genocide against Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct.

  America saw through the hypocrisy — and many saw its root cause as well, which is the diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy dominating most schools. The left’s Fareed Zakaria, writing at CNN, was among them, putting it this way:

  People sense the transformation…. Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming…. What we saw in the House hearing this week was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. Out of this culture of diversity has grown the collection of ideas and practices that we have all now heard of — safe spaces, trigger warnings, and micro aggressions…. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but as partisan outfits, which means they will keep getting buffeted by these political storms as they emerge. 

  Universities face a reckoning. The University of Pennsylvania’s president already lost her job over it. Others likely will follow. The University of Wisconsin perhaps figured this out. On Friday, it announced a deal with critics that would freeze hiring for diversity positions through the end of 2026 and shift at least 43 diversity positions to focus on “student success.” The system also would eliminate any statements supporting diversity on student applications. However, the Board of Regents rejected the deal on Saturday.

  Perhaps most impactful, donors have revolted, and if anything gets the attention of university bureaucrats it’s money.

  It’s time for universities to do what’s right, which happens also happens to be in their own interest.

  Among Illinois schools, one maintains a policy that most conspicuously enforces the culture of DEI oppression Zakaria described. That’s the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with its mandatory DEI loyalty policy for faculty. It’s called Communication 9 and was finalized earlier this year. It’s summarized here and detailed here. Compliance is “optional” currently but becomes mandatory in two years.

  It’s particularly egregious because it goes further than demanding agreement with DEI principles: It mandates DEI work and requires annual statements demonstrating that work. Going forward evaluations, promotions and tenure decisions must be based in part on the adequacy of the DEI work performed, Communication 9 says. It doesn’t matter what field one is in; all faculty are bound by it.

  “Engage in DEI activism, or else.” That’s how The College Fix put it in their headline when Communication 9 was in draft last year.

  The policy even mandates use of woke language in the required personal DEI statements:

  “Candidates should be sensitive about the use of language that perpetuate prejudices and words that apply external value judgments that minimize the experiences, strengths, and contributions of individuals and/or groups historically marginalized and/or underrepresented in academia.”

  “It is important that candidates avoid statements that overgeneralize or make sweeping claims about a group of people,” says the policy.

  (It’s safe to assume, however, that wouldn’t apply to claims like “Whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity,” which we hear from DEI champions like Ingram X. Kendi.)

  Communication 9 begs for litigation as a violation of the First Amendment, as we wrote when it was in draft. It’s a classic example of unconstitutional “forced speech.” Two First Amendment experts we spoke to compared it to unconstitutional loyalty oaths required during the years of McCarthyism.

  Ending Communication 9 would also help cut some of the DEI administrative bloat that plagues U of I, which is among the worst on that count. It ranks seventh highest in the nation with 71 DEI staff, according to a Heritage Foundation study we reported on last year.

  “A review of salary data shows that the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, plus Virginia Tech, boast some of the highest-paid DEI staffers at public universities,” said a Fox News column on that study.

  “These institutions’ top diversity employees earn salaries ranging from $329,000 to $430,000 – vastly eclipsing the average pay for the schools’ full-time tenured professors.” Sean C. Garrick, vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of Illinois, earned nearly $330,000 annually, salary disclosures showed, according to the Fox column. But the average Illinois full-time professor salary hovers only around $152,000, Fox said.

  Many other universities require DEI statements and have bloated DEI staffs like UIUC on which they, too, should backtrack. But UIUC seems among the worst with its Communication 9, and it should lead.

  UIUC is a superb school in most other ways and an exceptionally valuable research institution. It, along with some of our other universities, are priceless Illinois assets.

  They better act before they face the wrath of unhappy donors and Americans fed up with DEI excess.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 18:40

• Watch Live: Matt Taibbi Fact-Checks Newsguard, Talks Burisma, Virality Project, And "Trump-Vermin" Switcheroo
  Watch Live: Matt Taibbi Fact-Checks Newsguard, Talks Burisma, Virality Project, And “Trump-Vermin” Switcheroo

  Matt Taibbi of Racket News has a new format he’s experimenting with top “get a lot of news out faster” with a new livestreamed format.

  

  Tonight, the award-winning journalist will introduce a new feature dubbed “Fact-Checking Newsguard,” and also plans to discuss various goings-on withe the censorious Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) / Virality Project, Burisma, and the “Trump-Vermin switcheroo.”

  Watch below:

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 18:20

• 1-In-5 Young Americans Say Holocaust Was A Myth, Twice As Many Democrats As Republicans
  1-In-5 Young Americans Say Holocaust Was A Myth, Twice As Many Democrats As Republicans

  A new poll sheds light on why so many college-aged Americans aren’t worried about expressing antisemitism: Twenty percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth.

  

  Specifically, as The College Fix reports, the YouGov/The Economist poll shows eight percent of that age group “strongly agrees” that the World War II Nazi  Jewish genocide program is bogus, while 12 percent “tend to agree.”

  Thirty percent neither agreed nor disagreed the Holocaust happened, The Hill reports.

  In addition, twenty-three percent said the Holocaust “has been exaggerated,” and 28 percent believe Jews “wield too much power” in the U.S.

  More blacks and Hispanics than whites agreed with the three statements, and the Holocaust “myth” results held steady across all education levels.

  In comparison, no Americans over age 65 said the Holocaust is a myth, only two percent “tend to agree” it’s exaggerated, and six percent believe Jews have too much power.

  

  “Why do some young Americans embrace such views?” The Economist asks.

  “Social media might play a role.”

  According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations.

  More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok. Social-media sites are rife with conspiracy theories, and research has found strong associations between rates of social-media use and beliefs in such theories. In one recent survey by Generation Lab, a data-intelligence company, young adults who used TikTok were more likely to hold antisemitic beliefs.

  Yesterday, senators introduced a bill to reauthorize federal funding for the Never Again [Holocaust] Education Act. The House put forth its own bill last month.

  Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen (D) said:

  “Failing to educate students about the gravity and scope of the Holocaust is a disservice to the memory of its victims and to our duty to prevent such atrocities in the future.”

  Other results from the poll (18-29 year-olds vs. those age 65+):

  • 36 vs. 13 percent believe “Israel exploits Holocaust victimhood for its own purposes.”

  • 33 vs. six percent say “people should boycott Israeli goods and products.”

  • 32 vs. 13 percent believe “Israel is an apartheid state.”

  • 40 vs. 18 percent say “Israel is deliberately trying to wipe out the Palestinian population.”

  • 51 vs. 88 percent believe “Israel has the right to exist.”

  Democrats are leading the charge when it comes to believing the Holocaust is a myth, a new survey by YouGov showed.

  Of those who answered the YouGov survey, 10% of Democrats believe the Holocaust is a myth. Conversely, 6% of Republicans also believe the Holocaust is a myth. 

  “Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to say hate crimes against Black, Muslim, and Arab people in the U.S. are serious problems. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say hate crimes against Christians and white people are serious,” Kathy Frankovic of YouGov wrote.

  [YouGov Survey] Top groups that believe the Holocaust didn’t happen:

  -Democrats: 10% (vs 5% of Republicans)
  -Black people: 13% (vs 5% white people)
  -City residents: 14% (vs 3% rural people)
  -Young people: 20% (vs 0% of age 65+)

  Jewish leftists are gonna have a really hard time… pic.twitter.com/P1uq0VHehD

  — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 8, 2023

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  Which may help explains why despite antisemitic attacks having risen dramatically across the US since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, more than 100 House Democrats refused Thursday to vote on a resolution condemning antisemitism.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 18:00

• David Stockman On Washington's Entrenched War Machine
  David Stockman On Washington’s Entrenched War Machine

  Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

  After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later as Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an abrupt end.

  

  The world had descended into a “77-Years War”. It had incepted with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into World War II and the Cold War that followed inexorably thereupon.

  Upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and the follies of Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

  At the end of the Cold War, therefore, the last embers of the fiery madness that had incepted with the guns of August 1914 had finally burned out. Peace was at hand. Yet 32 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.

  The proof is plain as day. The unnecessary invasions and occupations of Iraq, the Washington-instigated shambles of Syria, the wanton destruction of Yemen, the regime change-cum barbarism that NATO inflicted upon Libya, the brutal sanctions and covert military war on Iran, the current unspeakable catastrophe financed by Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and countless more lessor depredations, tell you all you need to know.

  All of these misadventures bespeak the fact that the War Party is entrenched in the nation’s capital, where it is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war. These forces ensure endless waste on armaments; they cause the inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st-century high-tech warfare; and they inherently generate terrorist blow-back from those upon whom the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.

  Worse still, Washington’s great war machine and teeming national security industry is its own agent of self-perpetuation. When it is not invading, occupying and regime changing, its vast apparatus of internal policy bureaus and outside contractors, lobbies, think tanks and NGOs is busy generating reasons for new imperial ventures.

  So there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77-Years War ended. The great general and President, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial-congressional complex” in the draft of his farewell address. But that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.

  So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday-afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of Beltway busybodies who constituted the civilian branches of the Cold War Armada (CIA, State, AID, NED and the rest) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.

  In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1991 was that the American Imperium would not go away quietly into the good night.

  In fact, during the past 31 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the Cold War. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.

  A few months after that horrendous slaughter had been unleashed 109 years ago, however, soldiers along the western front broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, song and even exchange of gifts. For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell.

  As Will Griggs once described it,

  A sudden cold snap had left the battlefield frozen, which was actually a relief for troops wallowing in sodden mire. Along the Front, troops extracted themselves from their trenches and dugouts, approaching each other warily, and then eagerly, across No Man’s Land. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, as were gifts scavenged from care packages sent from home. German souvenirs that ordinarily would have been obtained only through bloodshed – such as spiked pickelhaube helmets, or Gott mit u9s belt buckles – were bartered for similar British trinkets. Carols were sung in German, English, and French. A few photographs were taken of British and German officers standing alongside each other, unarmed, in No Man’s Land.

  

  The truth is, there was no good reason for the Great War. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.

  The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time, however. And for the same reasons.

  *  *  *

  The amount of money the US government spends on foreign aid, wars, the so-called intelligence community, and other aspects of foreign policy is enormous and ever-growing. It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating, and now approaching a breaking point. It could cause the most significant disaster since the 1930s. Most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video with all the details. Click here to watch it now.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 17:40

• Tucker Carlson Launches Streaming Subscription Service
  Tucker Carlson Launches Streaming Subscription Service

  Tucker Carlson has launched a new streaming service, the Tucker Carlson Network, which costs $9 per month (with a $6/month introductory price to become a ‘founding member’).

  

  The former Fox News host’s network features interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, commentary and early access to tickets for future live events.

  “We’ve been working in secret and producing an awful lot of material for months now. We’re launching a brand-new thing very soon,” Carlson said in a Saturday post on X.

  Join us. https://t.co/sLkXnGKCFd pic.twitter.com/G8Fv2VVAlo

  — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 9, 2023

  On Monday, Carlson’s network posted a preview of what’s to come:

  Join us. https://t.co/sLkXnGKCFd pic.twitter.com/G8Fv2VVAlo

  — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 9, 2023

  pic.twitter.com/3gnkCwCmqV

  — Simon Ateba (@simonateba) December 11, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  His social media person is already off to a good start:

  pic.twitter.com/SIoDiXLGm3

  — Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork) December 11, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsCarlson, who parted ways with Fox in April, has been releasing interviews on X, which have included Donald Trump, Victor Orban, Javier Milei, Ice Cube, Devon Archer, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and many more. And we should note, these interviews often pull better numbers than Fox News‘ primetime lineup, while the losers at Fox attempt to badger presidential candidates into shilling for more Ukraine funds.

  Join the Tucker Carlson Network here…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 17:20

• It's Dark, But Breadth Says It's Not Quite Dawn For China Stocks
  It’s Dark, But Breadth Says It’s Not Quite Dawn For China Stocks

  Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

  After another dismal set of China inflation data, sentiment for Chinese stocks feels like it can’t get much worse.

  That can be a sign the market will soon bottom, but breadth is not yet at the extreme capitulatory levels that would give a much higher confidence to this view. Nevertheless, the risk-reward for some exposure to China stocks remains attractive.

  I had thought the bottom in China stock was perhaps in last month, but the economic data has continued to be dreadful. Over the weekend, November’s CPI came in at -0.5% and PPI at -3%, both lower than the previous month.

  Confidence would be higher that a tradeable bottom is near if breadth was more extreme. However, the net number of stocks in the CSI 300 index making new 52-week lows has been more stretched at previous bottoms in the index. Similarly for the number of stocks with an RSI of less than 30 and the percentage of stocks trading below their 200-day moving averages.

  Furthermore, we haven’t yet seen a spike in volume which often occurs at capitulatory junctures.

  

  China’s decision to have one of the longest and most stringent lockdowns while giving its household sector scant support (unlike many DM countries) has led to the country being the only one to have experienced outright deflation since 2020, when every other main country has experienced inflation, often the highest for decades.

  

  A weak real-estate sector and the severe dent to confidence from lockdowns has led to a spend-averse household sector.

  The fall in CPI is being driven by a decline in food and consumer goods. Food is estimated to be about a third of the CPI basket, with goods (including food) accounting for just under two thirds of the total.

  Global food prices have started to rise again, so this may soon provide support to China’s CPI.

  

  With so much bad news already in the price, there is good risk-reward for beginning to accumulate China stocks, but breadth data suggests we are perhaps not quite yet at the point of “revulsion,” forcing the last speculative longs out, and clearing the way for a sustainable rally.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 12/11/2023 – 17:00

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