Actually Axios, An Unproductive Congress Is A Good Thing
New data from analytics firm Quorum shows that the 118th Congress is on the verge of becoming the least productive in decades, possibly even in history. Interestingly, this is being viewed negatively by Axios journalists, who seemingly do not understand that internal conflicts within the House Republican majority have been a blessing in disguise that has only slowed down the federal government’s ability to enact new legislation in a climate of overregulation weighing on economic productivity.
“Just 20 bills have been passed by both chambers and signed into law this year, with another four currently awaiting President Biden’s signature,” Axios journalist Andrew Solender wrote.
Solender continued, “That’s far below even historically unproductive first years: The 104th, 112th and 113th Congresses, in which Republicans controlled one or both chambers with Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the White House, passed between 70 and 73 laws.”
This is progress. Every law passed is another right infringed. You may enjoy living in a box that if you accidentally step outside of it you get charged with multiple crimes, but I don’t. Congress has been mostly worthless for decades. I would rather they do nothing.
According to a recent report by the center-right think tank American Action Forum, the Biden administration has increased the regulatory burden by $318 billion in total costs and more than 218 million hours of paperwork in the last two years (as of May of this year).
AAF noted, “An increased regulatory burden erects barriers to entry that are negatively associated with firm births, firm deaths, and increased profits among incumbent firms – meaning regulations inhibit new market entrants while cementing the position of existing firms.”
Fewer regulations are a start; as one X user pointed out, “Now do the spending.”
After decades in the classroom, award-winning teacher Steve Gardiner, of Billings, Montana, became acutely aware of a new problem making it difficult for his high-school students to learn.
“The phones were disruptive and distracting—the most disruptive and distracting thing in the classroom in my 38 years of teaching,” Mr. Gardiner, now retired, told The Epoch Times.
“Students could not stop looking at them. And when they weren’t looking at them, they were thinking about looking at them. I called it an addiction.”
Experts now are calling attention to how smartphone use in the classroom can have negative effects on learning and safety at school. They show evidence that suggests allowing students to keep the devices with them during the school day leads to poorer academic performance, and sometimes even compromised safety and an increased chance of devastating consequences of bullying.
Mr. Gardiner takes teaching—and impediments to it—seriously. He holds a doctorate in education, served three years on the board of directors of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. He was Montana’s Teacher of the Year in 2008.
While teaching English at Billings Senior High School, he was so concerned about the impact of phones on learning that he conducted an informal survey. He asked eight business owners in town how they addressed employee use of cellphones on the job.
“It was amazing,” Mr. Gardiner said. “All but one had a variation of the same policy, and that was that texting on the job was not allowed, and an employee would be given two warnings, if caught texting, and after that, he would be terminated.”
The only exception was the local newspaper, he said, because staff sending texts “to ask questions, research, and receive information was part of the job.”
Teens Tethered to Phones
As the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic caused social isolation and prolonged absences from school, children’s time online increased dramatically.
In the United States, children and teens aged 10 to 14 more than doubled their daily time online, going from an average of 3.8 hours to 7.7 hours, according to research published in a JAMA Pediatrics research letter on Nov. 1, 2021.
Even as quarantine restrictions were reversed, the authors wrote, “screen use remains persistently elevated.”
Almost all students have smartphones now.
“Getting a smartphone is now a rite of passage for most children and adolescents in the United States,” states Common Sense Media in its 2023 study titled “Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person’s Smartphone Use.”
The study notes that “about half of U.S. children get their smartphone by age 11.”
Common Sense Media—citing its own data and research from Peggy Rideout and the Pew Research Center—reported that 88 percent to 95 percent of teens (aged 13 to 18) have their own smartphone.
Shortly after Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, almost all schools implemented some sort of ban on phones.
But the breadth of the ban has fluctuated over the years.
In 2009, 90 percent of U.S. schools had bans on cell phones in class, according to the National Education Association (NEA).
By 2015, only 67 percent of schools had cell phone bans.
In 2020, the number of schools banning smartphones had jumped back up to 77 percent of schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Teachers have been competing with cell phones for the eyes and ears of students for more than a decade, an insight documented by a 2010 Pew Research Center study. It includes data from 2009, when 90 percent of U.S. schools had cellphone bans.
Of the teens surveyed, 62 percent said they could have their phones in school but not in class, and 24 percent were not allowed to have phones on school property. Of those who attended a school with a total ban, 65 percent brought their phones to school anyway, and 58 percent texted in class.
While in class, 64 percent of teens said they had texted, and 25 percent had made or received a call, researchers found.
Arnold Glass understands well the lure and attraction of the phone to students.
Mr. Glass, a professor of cognitive psychology at Rutgers University, led a team that, in 2018, published the first academic study documenting how cell phones in classrooms lower student test scores.
“The negative effects of cell phones in the classroom were immediately obvious, which led to the initial bans,” Mr. Glass told The Epoch Times.
“However, there was pushback from parents and school boards, and principals caved in to what they knew was a destructive policy” and allowed students to bring them to school.
“Now school boards are being sued by parents for outcomes—including bullying—that are consequences of permitting cell phones in schools,” he said. “So, the self-protective bans are being reinstated.”
While bans in varying forms are common now throughout the nation, only Florida has made it the law. In May, two weeks before announcing his presidential run, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 379, which prohibits student use of phones in class during instructional time in public schools.
And in Florida, the school board of Orange County Public Schools (OCPS)—the eighth largest public school district in the country—instituted an even more restrictive cell phone policy than the state law.
Under the new regulations, approved in August, students are prohibited, except in an emergency, from using their phones at any time during the school day. Students are allowed to have their phones on them, as long as they’re kept in a backpack.
OCPS now is conducting a survey asking students, parents, and teachers about the policy and how it can be improved. The survey results will be released after winter break.
Yet already there is positive feedback on the phone restrictions, OCPS media relations manager Michael Ollendorff told The Epoch Times.
“Anecdotally, we are seeing an improvement in grades, and more positive in-person interactions among students,” Mr. Ollendorff said.
“We are also finding that during lunchtime—when in the past kids were busy on their phones—they’re now playing games, including pickleball and cornhole.”
Lawmakers in Congress also are considering the topic of cellphones in school.
In October, U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) introduced the Focus on Learning Act. The bill would appropriate $5 million for the Secretary of Education to “conduct a study regarding the use of mobile devices in elementary schools, and to establish a pilot program of awarding grants to enable certain schools to create a school environment free of mobile devices.”
China, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and other nations have established variations of bans on phones in class.
In August, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) called for an international ban on smartphones in classrooms. The United States is a member of UNESCO.
Proof of the Problem
“Dividing attention in the classroom reduces exam performance,” Mr. Glass showed in a 2017 study published in the academic journal Educational Psychology. He co-authored the work with Mengxue Kang, a fellow professor of cognitive psychology at Rutgers.
The study is often referenced by those advocating for bans or curtailed access to phones in school.
“I’ve studied learning and memory for over 50 years,” Mr. Glass said. One of his main pursuits has been “to create instruction tools to improve performance in the classroom.”
Research and analysis of the academic performance of his students from 2005 through 2010 showed that the technology and tools he implemented in his teaching and in the classroom environment were producing positive results, he said.
“The students were doing better in their exams every year until 2010, when we hit a ceiling, and then marks started falling, and I needed to see why,” Mr. Glass said.
October Was The 2nd Biggest Month Of Foreign Selling Of US Stocks Ever, Officials Dump TSYs As Gold Reserves Soar
For the second month in a row, total foreign net long-term portfolio securities inflows to the US were tiny (just $3.3BN)…
Source: Bloomberg
October was an ugly month for US equities (only to be followed by two months of staggering gains)…
Source: Bloomberg
…and now we have a good idea who was behind that selling. The latest TIC dats shows October saw the second biggest month of foreign selling of US stocks ever…
While both private and official entities were sellers of stocks in October, Foreign Official entities were net sellers of US Treasuries…
Source: Bloomberg
…but Private entities were buyers of Treasuries…
Source: Bloomberg
Belgium and Luxembourg were the biggest sellers of US Treasuries (-$31.6BN and -$28.2BN respectively) and China was also a seller (-$8.5BN)
Combining China and Belgium’s data (since Beijing is using Euroclear as custodian for many of its TSY holdings), we see that “China” sold over $40BN in TSYs in October – its second biggest-selling month since Nov 2016…
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, we continue to broadly see the trend of de-dollarization with gold holdings on the rise as UST holdings slide lower…
Source: Bloomberg
It really began gathering pace in 2019…
Source: Bloomberg
…and if Powell pivots as promised, we suspect that will continue.
An Epoch Times investigation has revealed further details on Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu, the person behind the black-market biolab discovered in California, as well as his connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The secret biolab operated in a warehouse in Reedley, California, about 25 miles southeast of Fresno. It was discovered on Dec. 19, 2022, by Jesalyn Harper, a code enforcement officer with the City of Reedley Fire Department.
In the warehouse, Ms. Harper discovered thousands of vials of infectious agents, including coronavirus, chlamydia, E. coli, streptococcus pneumonia, HIV, hepatitis, herpes, rubella, and malaria.
On Oct. 19, 2023, Mr. Zhu was arrested in California and charged with manufacturing and distributing misbranded medical devices and for making false statements to the FDA.
Mr. Zhu filed a suit against the city of Reedley for $30 million and against the county for $50 million. The prospect of having a conversation with the city leaders regarding his claims was used to entice him to show up at the warehouse and have him arrested on the spot by FDA agents with automatic machine guns in their hands.
Mr. Zhu had claimed that he was a consultant named David He hired to help get Universal Meditech and Prestige Biotech out of the trouble they were in. Prestige Biotech is the company that owns the biolab in Reedley.
However, City of Reedley officials recognized him as Universal Meditech’s president.
“This is not a hired consultant; this is the lab CEO. The picture we have of the lab CEO matches this guy perfectly,” said Nicole Zieba, Reedley city manager, in an interview with The Epoch Times.
But she still cannot figure out what Mr. Zhu was thinking in suing the city, pretending to be someone else, and bringing attention to himself, which ultimately led to his arrest.
“I’m not sure if it’s stupidity, arrogance, or some long con that we simply haven’t figured out … but it certainly is confounding and baffling to me,” said Ms. Zieba.
The investigation by The Epoch Times revealed additional connections between Mr. Zhu and the CCP. Mr. Zhu’s father, Zongxiang Zhu, was born in 1923 and is a famed acupuncture expert and medical educator in China. He also serves as Director Professor of Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to 163.com.
According to a Chinese encyclopedia, until recently Zongxiang Zhu has been involved in various activities and has been a very well recognized figure in China.
Jiabei Zhu’s mother, Pengdi Zhu, was listed as one of the ultimate beneficial owners at Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited and at least four other Chinese companies controlled by Jiabei Zhu, according to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party report that was released on Nov. 15, 2023.
Pengdi Zhu’s name is also listed as the beneficial owner of Qingdao Aide Biotechnology Development Fund (General Partnership), a company that partners with Jiabei Zhu’s company Ai De Biopharmaceutical Industry (Qingdao) Co., Ltd.
Shanghai Kunpeng Technology Investment and Development Limited, a company that has Pengdi Zhu as its legal representative and that is currently suspended according to the Shanghai Businesses listing website, invested 2,250,000 yuan (approximately $314,879) in Aide Modern Cattle Industry (Qingdao) Company Limited in December 2020.
According to the House Select Committee’s report, the main company Jiabei Zhu controlled, Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited, was established in 2002 with a registered equity of 181,000,000 yuan ($25,219,092 with today’s exchange rate).
According to the company’s listing website, the company has gotten into 62 lawsuits, the most recent one a financial loan contract dispute, which triggered a 10 million yuan ($1,393,418 under current rate) equity freeze and ended in an execution that targeted 12,294,755 yuan ($1,713,698 under current rate) on Oct. 27, 2023.
According to the updated status on the qcc.com website, Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited was listed as “abnormally operating” on Sept. 23, 2021 because people were not able to contact the company via the registered address.
Though The Epoch Times did not obtain the exact date Mr. Zhu entered the United States as Qiang (David) He, the year 2021 matches the time that his main company in China was listed as “abnormally operating” due to lack of contact.
Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited is still active, according to the qcc.com website. Xuejun Zhang, board member of the public company Jushri Technologies Inc., was also listed as an active board member of Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited, on page 39 of the Jushri Technologies 2022 annual report issued April 24, 2023.
Mr. Zhu had a judgment against him in 2016 for $330 million in Canadian dollars from the Canadian Supreme Court as well as another judgment for $8.5 million in Canadian dollars in a Hong Kong court in the same year. However, no lawsuits were filed in China for the same damages incurred, where Aide continues to operate.
Other connections include Barry Zhang (Bai-Rui Zhang), who is listed as Prestige Biotech’s registered agent by the Nevada Secretary of State; and Michael M. Lin (Meng-Ru Lin) of Lin Law Group in Nevada, who is the leading attorney hired by Universal Meditech. Both have close relationships with the CCP’s United Front.
Mr. Zhang was listed as one of the community leaders in Hunan Benevolent Association of America, according to its official website, while Mr. Lin was an active sponsor for the Las Vegas Chinese Spring Festival Gala supported by Consulate General of P.R.C. in San Francisco.
Universal Meditech also seemed to have a close relationship with the Chinese government. Its COO, Candace Liu, attended the 2019 China-California Business Forum as a guest. The forum was mainly organized by the Chinese General Consulate Los Angeles as well as the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, according to a UNE News report.
Currently, according to LinkedIn, Ms. Liu is the vice president of business development, North America, at jd.com, one of China’s largest online retail companies.
The California biolab received more than $1.3 million in unexplained payments from banks in China while in operation, according to U.S. lawmakers.
Possible Ebola in Freezer
In May 2023, several agencies inspected the lab—the CDC, FDA, County Public Health, and California Department of Public Health. They looked at all the items in the refrigerators and freezers that were labeled and that they could determine what they were. However, there were many other items that were not labeled or were labeled with a code that the city officials had no key to.
The CDC created a report for the 20 items that were labeled. All these items were sprayed down, disinfected, and put in special waste containers to be incinerated.
In July, a city worker found a freezer that was labeled “Ebola.”
“It was a white piece of paper that was folded over where you couldn’t read it unless you specifically unfolded it. And that paper read Ebola, and it was handwritten,” Ms. Harper with the city of Reedley told The Epoch Times.
Nothing inside that freezer was labeled. This gave Ms. Harper some sleepless nights. The CDC would not investigate something unless it had a specific label on it.
“Unless an item is actually labeled Ebola, it doesn’t fall under the CDC purview for their select agents,” said Ms. Harper.
The bags of potential Ebola virus were shoved in the freezer in a disorderly fashion. They were all in silver sealable bags.
The city never found out what was actually in the bags, as the CDC never examined them.
“They didn’t come, they didn’t test, they didn’t even ask us to sample, and I think that’s why the congressional report was so critical to [the] CDC,” said Ms. Harper.
Nevertheless, the samples were destroyed.
Some of the other refrigerators were found to have things of unknown nature spilled on the bottom of the trays, and it looked like they were taped and moved around in the warehouse or from another warehouse, Ms. Harper said.
“Everything seems to have been done very haphazardly,” she said.
Previously, the CDC ended up hanging up on Ms. Harper on a different inquiry. In March 2023 during an inspection warrant, after the inspectors left, Ms. Harper was left alone in the building as she had to determine whether to turn off the power to the building in order to prevent a fire, given the disorderly things in the warehouse.
With the power off, the freezers’ contents would melt with potentially dangerous consequences due to the pathogens. This is when she called the CDC for advice.
“It was a very short-lived and frustrating phone call that ended with them hanging up,” said Ms. Harper.
She ended up not turning off the power in the part of the building where the freezers were after she consulted with Ms. Zieba.
While Ms. Zieba and Ms. Harper are not aware of any other possible charges against Mr. Zhu, they feel that the Energy and Commerce congressional committees should get involved, since the select committee on the CCP does not have authority over privately funded labs, according to Ms. Zieba.
“There needs to be a single source within the government that is responsible for private labs,” added Ms. Zieba.
Both Ms. Zieba and Ms. Harper added that the congressional investigation was very non-partisan and involved great cooperation.
“From the way they talked, you couldn’t tell who was a Democrat and who was a Republican. And I thought, wow, this is phenomenal,” said Ms. Zieba.
While these viruses could have been used for research, they could also be weaponized.
“It is all in the intention,” said Ms. Harper.
According to Dr. Limeng Yan, a virologist who worked at the WHO Reference Lab at the University of Hong Kong until 2020, it is extremely difficult to transport these dangerous pathogens internationally and even more difficult to obtain them in the United States.
“If you need to do international transport, you have to acquire a very strict license from the local government and also the imported government; that means you have to get both approval from the country you ship it from and also [from] the United States. And also, all of these shipments need to be carefully monitored by the couriers, like, we use FedEx or DHL. Without a license, it could only be done illegally,” Mr. Yan told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Zhu is represented by Tony Capozzi, a well-known defense attorney in the Fresno area. Right after he was announced as Mr. Zhu’s defense attorney, Mr. Capozzi mentioned to another outlet that Mr. Zhu applied for asylum, but the attorney provided no confirmation or evidence when repeatedly asked by The Epoch Times.
Mr. Capozzi did respond to The Epoch Times stating that he is waiting for the evidence on the criminal charges filed against his client Mr. Zhu.
“I have not received any such discovery. The government indicated that it was not using the select committee report in the criminal case,” Mr. Capozzi stated.
Mr. Zhu pleaded not guilty to both charges on Nov. 16, and in the detention hearing, he also entered denial of forfeiture to the properties in the warehouse that have been mostly destroyed by the Reedley City under an abatement court order.
The next court date is set to Jan. 17, 2024 for a status conference. Until then, Mr. Zhu is to stay in custody, according to the court status website.
A date for the trial to start has not yet been set.
Mexican President Rages Against New ‘Migrant Arrest’ Law In Texas, Vows To Challenge
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is spitting mad after Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a measure into law that allows state law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants who have entered the US without authorization.
“We’re always going to be against these measures, and we want to say to our countrymen and migrants that we’re defending them. The governor of Texas is acting this way because he wants to be a candidate for vice president,” AMLO said during a Tuesday press briefing, adding “He’s not going to gain anything with this measure.”
The move comes after Texas – fed up with a federal government that continues letting illegal immigrants pour across the Rio Grande and then roam with impunity – took matters into its own hands on Monday, enacting a law that makes it a state crime to illegally enter the Lone Star State from a foreign nation.
When that law takes effect in March, illegal border crossings will become a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. Repeat offenses will be a second-degree felony subject to prison sentences from two to 20 years. Judges can kill the charges if an arrested immigrant agrees to go back to Mexico.
“President Biden’s deliberate inaction has left Texas to fend for itself,” said Abbott. “Today, I will sign three laws to better protect Texas—and America—from President Biden’s border neglect.” The other laws provide for an additional $1.54 billion to continue building border barriers, and increase the minimum jail sentence for migrant-smuggling from two years to 10.
Some sheriffs are uneasy about their capacity to hold and manage what could be an enormous population of detainees. “In just one section of the 1,254-mile Texas border with Mexico, around the cities of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, federal agents encountered 38,000 migrants in October,” reports the New York Times.
Abbott’s signing ceremony comes as jaw-dropping hordes of migrants swamped the border in Eagle Pass, and as the Border Patrol has halted freight train activity on two railway bridges connecting Texas and Mexico, as smugglers pack migrants like cattle onto northbound rail cars.
JUST IN: Fox News’ Bill Melugin utterly shocked at the overwhelming amount of migrants currently waiting to be processed in Eagle Pass, Texas.
“I’ve spent hundreds of days there over the last 2+ years and I’ve never seen it like this.”
The law authorizing Texas police officers to arrest illegal immigrants is certain to precipitate a legal showdown between Texas and the federal government — one that could ultimately see the US Supreme Court take a new look at their decision in Arizona v United States. In that June 2012 case, the court ruled by a 5-3 majority in favor of the federal government monopolizing immigration policy.
However, as law professor Josh Blackman points out at The Volokh Conspiracy, the Arizona majority decision included a sentence that left open the issue of detentions like those enabled by the new Texas law:
“There is no need in this case to address whether reasonable suspicion of illegal entry or another immigration crime would be a legitimate basis for prolonging a detention, or whether this too would be preempted by federal law.”
Democrats are already urging the Justice Department to intervene. In a letter to the DOJ, San Antonio Congressman Joaquin Castro and 20 other representatives ask Attorney General Merrick Garland to “assert your authority over federal immigration and foreign policy and pursue legal action, as appropriate, to stop this unconstitutional and dangerous legislation from going into effect.”
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), a union representing 18,000 support Border Patrol personnel, has an entirely different view: “As the flagrant disregard of our laws too often is the norm throughout our country, Texans can be proud that their governor will not back down to pervasive and radical woke ideology.“
Biden Mulls Relisting Houthis As A Terror Org, Weighs Offensive Strikes
The White House has confirmed that it is currently reviewing whether to (re)designate Yemen’s Houthis as a terrorist organization, after for the past weeks the militant Islamist group has attacked several commercial ships and launched missile and drone attacks against Israel as retaliation for the Gaza campaign.
Likely this would allow for more offensive actions against Houthi positions by the US military, and without Congressional approval, when US assets or commercial shipping comes under attack. Asked about a possible new designation in an afternoon press conference, national security council spokesman John Kirby said that “we’re actually conducting a review right now on whether that’s the right course forward.” US officials have raised the possibility of offensive military strikes for the first time, via news wires:
POSSIBLE STRIKES ON HOUTHIS IN YEMEN CONSIDERED, PEOPLE SAY
US WEIGHS WHETHER TO ATTACK HOUTHIS BEYOND DEFENSIVE TASK FORCE
PEOPLE FAMILIAR SAY NO DECISION MADE YET ON STRIKING HOUTHIS
Top Biden spokesman John Kirby says the Biden administration is considering re-designating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization.
REMINDER: It was Biden who LIFTED the terrorist designation on the Houthis back in 2021. pic.twitter.com/wrlpXKxj4o
But ironically it was the Biden administration that took the Houthis off the terror list in the first place, in 2021.
Below is what Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in February of that year:
Effective February 16, I am revoking the designations of Ansarallah, sometimes referred to as the Houthis, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under the Immigration and Nationality Act and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, as amended.
This decision is a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen. We have listened to warnings from the United Nations, humanitarian groups, and bipartisan members of Congress, among others, that the designations could have a devastating impact on Yemenis’ access to basic commodities like food and fuel.
The Saudi-UAE-US coalition has waged a brutal air war against Yemen and the rebel Houthis going back to 2015, unleashing a dire humanitarian crisis.
The Houthis have long been seen as proxies of Iran, and have lately declared war against both Israel and any vessel going to Israeli ports. The US on Monday announced a ten-nation coalition to patrol and protect the Red Sea from these attacks. This has included, interestingly enough, the tiny island country of the Seychelles. But the Houthis say their resolve remains undeterred…
Amid White House indecision, the number of major shipping and container companies which have temporarily halted all transit through the Bab al-Mandab Strait and the Red Sea has only grown.
They are as follows: the Italian-Swiss giant Mediterranean Shipping Company, France’s CMA CGM, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, Belgium’s Euronav, oil giant BP, Denmark’s A.P Moller-Maersk, Taiwan shipping firm Evergreen, and Norway-based Frontline. As for the naval coalition, there are reports saying it could take a few weeks to actually materialize. By then, many more vessels are likely to come under attack.
The Houthis have meanwhile said this is all part of the war against Palestinians. “The international coalition that America announced under the pretext of protecting maritime navigation in the Red Sea is an alliance to protect the Israeli entity and to protect Israeli ships. It is an integral part of the aggression against the Palestinian people, Gaza, and the Arab and Islamic nations,” the group said in a new statement.
Harvard president Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for minimizing Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.
Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.
This is incredible: In her dissertation, Claudine Gay plagiarized the language of her acknowledgment from the acknowledgment of another scholar, without citing the source. She couldn’t even say “thank you” without plagiarizing the language. pic.twitter.com/UcztaGBUzn
While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendations the following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.
In 2022, Gay implemented an initiative at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “denaming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration. According to the report, commissioned by then-president Lawrence Bacow, these decisions would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values.” In other words, Harvard would use the standards of present-day social-justice activism to pass judgment on men who lived hundreds of years prior—at best, an ahistorical and deeply ambiguous method. As part of this project, Gay sent an email to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences community soliciting “requests for denaming,” promising to address the situation “through the lens of reckoning.” Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president.
As president, Gay leads a sprawling DEI bureaucracy—officially, the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—that seeks to influence how students speak, think, and behave in relation to race. Though the university deleted nearly all DEI materials from its website following President Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony related to the Hamas terror attack, I have recovered some of these documents through an Internet archive. Harvard’s DEI administrators encourage students to internalize the basic narrative of critical race theory: America is a nation defined by “systemic racism,” “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” and the “weaponization of whiteness.” In another resource, students were invited to “unpack” their “white privilege” and “male privilege,” and to consider their “white fragility,” which stems from “the privilege that accrues to white people living in a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.”
What is one to make of Gay’s record as a whole? She is hardly a “scholar’s scholar,” as the university magazine tried to portray her, having published, according to her curriculum vitae, just 11 academic papers—nearly half of which include plagiarized material. Nor is she a competent administrator, having botched the response to rampant anti-Semitism on campus and, by one estimate, lost the university more than $1 billion in donations. But she plays one role perfectly: the dutiful racialist, skilled at the manipulation of guilt, shame, and obligation in service of institutional power. For instance, she wrote last year in a message to the campus announcing a report on Harvard’s historical connection to slavery: “We have been excluded and denigrated for centuries from an institution where we now work, study, and lead. Our presence here should not feel so extraordinary. But now we see it was anything but inevitable.”
The irony: Gay was, in fact, somewhat inevitable. In the long season of racial guilt and animus that followed George Floyd’s death, the university was desperate to recruit a “first,” as Gay put it in her inaugural address, and disrupt the university’s nearly 400 years of whiteness. As Harvard is now learning, however, naming as president someone who sees race and sex not as incidental human attributes but as ideological constructions that must be imposed on the institution comes with a significant downside. Consequently, Harvard’s trustees find themselves in a bind: they hired Gay in large part for her identity and cannot fire her for the same reason. They seem resigned to muddling through the “racial reckoning,” however long it lasts and whatever further damage it inflicts on America’s oldest university.
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Trump Tries To Overturn Gag Order As Judge In Different Case Rejects Bid To Dismiss
Former President Donald Trump made yet another attempt to overturn a federal gag order at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit – with his attorneys arguing that the appeals panel was wrong on five counts, and as such, a rehearing is in order in the decision regarding his 2020 election interference case before Judge Tanya Chutkan.
“The opinion holds that President Trump must be silenced to protect trial participants from possible threats or ‘harassment’ from unrelated third parties,” reads the petition, after the appeals court panel agreed with the rationale of lower court judges in issuing two separate gag orders on the former president.
“In doing so, the opinion conflicts with decisions of the Supreme Court and other Circuits, warranting en banc consideration both to secure uniformity of this Court’s decisions and because of the question’s exceptional importance,” they wrote, requesting an en-banc hearing before all of the judges in the court.
The appeals panel said, first during a hearing and later in the issued opinion, that they sought a balance between First Amendment rights and the need to uphold the integrity of court proceedings.
The defense attorneys argue that the court ultimately accomplished neither and reinforced the gag order based on “a third standard, for which it cites no authority.” When it comes to restricting speech to prevent harm, there is another set of precedents to inform these decisions, and defense attorneys argue that the appellate court judges did not meet those standards, primarily the “clear and present danger” test set by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. –Epoch Times
Trump’s attorneys referenced cases in which it was ruled that presidential candidates have “absolute freedom” in their speech, and that the judges didn’t properly consider these cases. They also used the ‘heckler’s veto’ theory, arguing that the appeal’s court is wrongly making assumptions about anticipated reactions to Trump’s speech, and have justified those assumptions “on the basis that the audience is not ‘hostile’ to President Trump, but that justification contradicts the Supreme Court’s incitement doctrine.”
Judge questions expert witness, denies bid to dismiss
Meanwhile, in Trump’s New York real estate case, Judge Arthur Engoron rejected the former president’s bid to toss the case, while also questioning the credibility of a key defense witness who was paid nearly $900,000 to appear.
According to ENgoron, there were “fatal flaws” in the Trump team’s argument – the “most glaring” being the assumption that the testimony of their witnesses “is true and accurate, or at least that the Court, as the trier of fact, will accept it as true and accurate.”
One of the experts, NYU Professor of Accounting, Eli Bartov, refuted any suggestion that his payment influenced his opinion, and said he was “shocked” at the judge’s remarks, the Epoch Times reports.
“Bartov is a tenured professor, but all that his testimony proves is that for a million or so dollars, some experts will say whatever you want them to say,” wrote Engoron in his three-page ruling. “His overarching point was that the subject statements of financial condition were accurate in every respect.”
Mr. Bartov testified on Dec. 7 that he did not find any evidence of fraud in the Trump family real estate company’s financial statements, which are central to the New York attorney general’s allegations of overstating property values to gain favorable loan and insurance terms.
However, he pointed out in an email that his testimony included the fact that President Trump’s statement contained errors.
“No expert rebutted my testimony or testified that they found fraud,” Mr. Bartov said. “As to his speculation that my billing rate had anything to do with my opinion, this is my standard billing rate.”
Mr. Bartov disclosed that he billed more than $870,000 for approximately 650 hours of work, with payments received from both the Trump Organization and Save America, a political action committee supporting Trump’s 2024 election campaign. -Epoch Times
So, Trump can’t speak his mind, and his expert witness is discarded simply because the judge disagreed. What a world.
A London psychiatrist who spent 12 years working with children at the United Kingdom’s government-funded Tavistock gender clinic is warning that “transitioning” patients to a new gender identity isn’t the answer to gender dysphoria.
Countries embracing “gender-affirming care” risk needless mass sterilization, Dr. Az Hakeem told The Epoch Times. He is the author of the new book “Detrans: When Transition is Not the Solution.”
“I say affirmation therapy is not therapy—it’s grooming” them to accept the idea they were born in the wrong body, said Dr. Hakeem, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and honorary associate clinical professor at University College London Medical School.
He predicts in the next 5-10 years, society will see a massive number of so-called detransitoners, people who try to reverse steps they took in an attempt to medically change their gender. That’s because of an expected 8,000-fold increase in patients undergoing procedures and taking medications meant to try to alter their gender.
“I’m critiquing the whole of gender ideology,” he said. His book, he said, “debunks all the myths and dissects” transgenderism.
A False Solution
When a person is feeling confused about his or her identity, he or she may assume that it has to do with gender, especially with the current climate of affirmation of that kind of thinking, he said.
“It’s a false solution to a different problem,” Dr. Hakeem said.
The causes of gender dysphoria—or unhappiness with one’s gender—often are linked to autism, underlying trauma, or internalized homophobia, he said.
In many cases, vulnerable children are “groomed” to transition, often by parents, teachers, doctors, governments, or social media influencers, who plant the idea they might be transgender.
“It’s the only medical intervention that I know of for which there was no evidence,” Dr. Hakeem said. “There are no outcome studies for this.“
To medically castrate children with hormones or surgery is akin to the use of lobotomies or thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s, he said.
Thalidomide was a tranquilizer given to pregnant women around the world, resulting in thousands of severe birth defects. A lobotomy is a surgery that disrupts nerves to lobes in the brain. It formerly was used as a treatment for mental illness until the practice was deemed inhumane.
There have been enough dissenters to pause, at least temporarily, the headlong plunge into gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom. But it is still a popular course of action there and across Europe, Dr. Hakeem said.
The mental health profession has been captured ideologically, he said, even to the point of affirming children’s beliefs that they are cats and dinosaurs.
He sees the pressure applied to people to coerce them to agree with gender ideology and ignore science as “Orwellian.” That’s a term often used to equate happenings today to the dystopian, future, totalitarian state described in the 1949 novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell.
In the literary classic, the protagonist eventually succumbs to pressure to write 2 + 2 = 5, even though he knows it’s incorrect. That’s much like how people are expected to affirm adults and children who say they were born in the wrong body.
Though Dr. Hakeem no longer counsels patients on matters of gender identity because it’s “too politically dangerous,” he does meet with parents of children with gender dysphoria.
One mother who sought his advice has a daughter who was being affirmed as a boy at school against her wishes. But the mother took some comfort in knowing it could have been worse, he said.
“She said, ‘The only consolation I can take is that in class—she’s 15—she sits next to someone who the teachers are affirming as a pterodactyl, and someone who the teachers are affirming as a cat,'” Dr. Hakeem said.
Teachers and college lecturers in the United Kingdom recently have attended training courses to learn how to interact with students who identify “as cat gender,” he said.
‘Horrified By What I Saw’
Psychiatrists don’t affirm the beliefs of schizophrenic patients who say they hear voices, Dr. Hakeem said. Yet, he marveled, they affirm gender confusion by allowing irrevocable chemical or surgical sterilization.
His stint working at Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS), the gender clinic for minors at The Tavistock Centre, was disturbing, he said.
GIDS started as a small part of the clinic that’s funded by the National Health Service (NHS). But it grew and took over, he said.
It was there Dr. Hakeem encountered incidents of what he considers “transhausen by proxy.”
The term refers to parents who want to transition their children to a different gender to meet their own narcissistic needs. It’s adapted from Munchausen by proxy, a medical condition in which a parent or caregiver invents medical problems of a child in his or her care in order to gain attention.
The U.K. government has ordered the Tavistock gender clinic to close—scheduled to happen in the spring of 2024—over concerns that diagnoses of gender dysphoria were being confirmed in patients with little investigation into the cause. The review found no solid evidence that “treatment” with puberty blockers or hormones benefited patients.
“I was horrified by what I saw,” Dr. Hakeem said.
“My role was every week to challenge and be a troublemaker, standing up for what I thought was common sense, while they were just a transition factory for little kids.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the clinic for comment. In an emailed response, a spokeswoman, who declined to be identified by name, wrote, “GIDS works on a case-by-case basis with every young person, their family and local services, working thoughtfully and holistically with them to explore their individual situation, with no expectation of what the right outcome for them might be.”
Dr. Hakeem recalled how the parents of a 4-year-old boy discussed steps they were taking to transition him.
“Parents who are saying, ‘Oh, yes, well, Johnny’s told us that he’s a girl, and we’ve told him he’s trapped in the wrong body. We bought him a wig. We’ve told the school we’re changing his name. He knows he’s going to get puberty blockers.'”
Things didn’t change after he left.
Some 70 children under the age of 5 were referred to the gender clinic from 2010 to 2022, according to GIDS data.
Dr. Hakeem remembers thinking that most of the children coming through the clinic would resolve their dysphoria over time, with many coming to realize they were gay.
“We know that most kids who are gender nonconforming or questioning their gender grow out of it, especially at puberty,” he said.
Those running the clinic appeared to think transitioning children and chemically castrating them was a better option than letting them be gay, he said.
“So they literally were transitioning the gay away.”
No, Ukraine Is Not Starting To Lose The War, Says An Agitated Zelensky
According to the AFP, fresh polling shows President Zelensky’s popularity has dropped precipitously among the Ukrainian population, with numbers showing that general trust has dropped to 62% compared to 84% one year ago.
This is perhaps why Zelensky was generally described as agitated at various points in an end-of-year Q&A session he gave Tuesday before an international press pool in Kyiv. At one point he responded flatly to a BBC reporter’s question about whether he thinks Ukraine is beginning to lose the war with a curt “no”. Here’s how things went from near the start of the presser:
Next Zelensky is asked a series of seemingly complex questions on domestic politics, one of which is about the possible creation of a government of national unity which would include technocrats – unelected leaders who are picked for their expertise.
The president seems visibly irritated by the questions and keeps shaking his head and frowning, saying they are too long and confusing.
“You’re talking too much,” he says, “I want you to ask a specific question.”
And yet despite everyone knowing the proverbial writing is on the wall, and that Ukraine has made no gains and his already running out of ammo, with US funding set to dry up by December 30, Zelensky reiterated his refusal to negotiate, and to press on with his aim of seeing Ukraine return to its pre-2014 borders.
This would of course mean wresting Crimea from Russian military control, something seen by pretty much all war observers as an impossibility. Zelensky stressed that it’s only along the terms of Ukraine’s own peace proposal that a ceasefire can be achieved. “The further Russia withdraws, the weaker it is,” he at one point stressed.
He elsewhere said he remains confident that Washington will stand by Ukraine even as foreign defense funding for next year is held up by holdout Republicans in US Congress and is anything but certain. “We are working very hard on this, and I am certain the United States of America will not betray us, and that on which we agreed in the United States will be fulfilled completely,” Zelensky said.
There was also this interesting moment, which a year ago would have been unthinkable for the Western press corp to ask, and strongly suggests he’s on the ropes politically and in popular opinion:
A CNN Portugal journalist is up now, asking Zelensky if he’s concerned about the prospect of Ukrainians “splitting up” both in their support for him and for the war.
The Ukrainian leader says unity is his country’s biggest “weapon”, and jokes that it’s “homemade”.
He says sticking together has helped Ukraine, and its people, stay strong since the war began.
On whether support for him as president is dwindling, Zelensky says he can only tell the reporter that it’s been an “honour” to hold the role. He adds that if some people don’t like how he’s doing the job, “that’s normal”.
Zelensky also in the press conference again mentioned that the Gaza crisis has by and large taken the globe’s focus away from Ukraine’s plight and Russian crimes. Zelensky has recently complained that this is “Russia’s goal” – to take the global focus away from the Ukraine war.
In most cases, it depends on us. If we don’t lose our resilience, if we don’t lose our spirit, we will end the war sooner. You can live with skepticism, but you can also f* a country with skepticism. I am not ready for the latter. – Zelensky pic.twitter.com/9NO7jpqoLv
Strongly suggesting that these are indeed desperate times, the Ukrainian leader further said he’s mulling the possibility of mobilizing an additional 500,000 reserve troops. But already Ukraine is sending older men to the front lines, and even calling up priests to fight in some cases.
Increasingly, mainstream media has become more realistic about Ukraine’s prospects. A November Wall Street Journal article, for example, urged that it’s time for the West to end its “magical thinking about Russia’s defeat”. This will inevitably mean peace negotiations which won’t be favorable to maintaining Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
