The Evil That Is ANTIFA: Killing Kirk

 The Evil That Is ANTIFA: Killing Kirk

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

This was written back on 18 May 2023:

 

A Congressman recently dismissed the Antifa danger by quoting FBI Director Wray who posited that Antifa is an ideology and not an organization.

 

Based on that, the Congressman concluded that only “organizations” pose credible threats.

 

The Congressman was wrong and his mistake was interpreting “ideology” and “organization” as a dichotomy, as a mutually exclusive “either-or” proposition.

 

Antifa is both. It is predominantly an ideology as Wray rightly stated but also an organization. Here is why:

 

Antifa comes from the German Antifaschischte Aktion – Anti Fascist Action. Antifa members back then were the storm troopers of the German Communist Party (KDP) who battled German fascist storm troopers – the brown shirts of the Nationalist Socialists (Nationalsozialistisches or Nazis). And both those “organizations” were driven by ideology.

 

American Antifa followers are direct successors to the old Antifa and share their radical leftist agenda and embrace violence, threats, and intimidation to achieve their aims.

 

Critically, American Antifa adherents are able to mass, arm themselves (in black body armor and masks), and then violently assault their target (a public protest or university campus meeting they oppose or a structure like a federal courthouse or public statue).

 

That clearly makes them organized but not a conventional organization. Because Antifa is anti-hierarchal (like many left-wing radicals such as anarchists) and decentralized it is more precisely an unconventional organization driven by ideology.

 

That is the truth. 

 

And if you want to know more, this was written a bit over 2 years earlier on 2 March 2021:

 

Defining Antifa as a legitimate organization solely focused on opposing fascism and racism is a lie. 

 

Antifa's ultimate objective is the end of the United States as a constitutional free-market democracy.

 

Antifa's ultimate objective is to bring down our government and replace it with Marxism intertwined with anarchism.

 

That has been its goal for decades and progressives need to quit lying to the American people and tell that truth. 

 

If you think Antifa champion Mark Bray's sanitized (sterile?) description of Antifa in today's America gives you the whole truth then you are both ignorant and an idiot.

 

Here is why in one telling point: Yes, the original Antifa, the street thugs of the German Communist Party, did battle the brown shirt thugs of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party. Good on them!

 

But Bray downplayed and often ignored the fact that Antifa's German Communist Party and the brown shirt's Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party often worked IN UNISON to destroy constitutional free-market democracy in Germany because they both hated it.

 

Ninety years later the methods and aims of Antifa (and Neo-Nazis) have not changed all that much, the really big change now is that the target is the United States, not Germany.

 

If you want the unvarnished truth about Antifa in America read Gabriel Nadales' Behind the Black Mask: My Time as an Antifa Activist.

 

Like Matryoshka dolls, Antifa has cells within cells within cells vaguely akin to the 1960-70s SDS and Marxist Weather Underground -- only more complex and self-actualizing. 

 

Consider these three factors to help explain the difference: 

 

First, the revolutionary agenda of anarchism and Marxism overlap but their beliefs often are contradictory. Put differently, Antifa Marxists use Antifa anarchists to advance their cause - not the other way around. 

 

Second, Antifa leads a loosely organized coalition of other radical leftist American organizations (whose names most of us have never heard of).

 

Third, while most terrorist groups seek to maximize the use of deadly violence, Antifa hopes to win its revolutionary struggle by using the least amount of violence necessary. Antifa does not renounce violence -- it seeks to control the escalation.

 

How deeply members penetrate Antifa's nested inner layers depends on commitment, skill, discipline, willingness to use violence, and critically, rigorous vetting.

 

This allows Antifa to use its outer shells to present itself as peacefully non-aligned activists who shield the inner core from close scrutiny.

 

This is the dividing line between members of little "a" antifa and Big "A" Antifa. 

 

Big "A" Antifa is comprised of violent quasi-terrorist Marxist-anarchist militants -- and let there be no doubt that the inner cell leaders control things far more than it appears. In that sense its organizational structure is more akin to al Qaeda in its first decade.

 

Secrecy also is paramount. Some inner cell members are overt Antifa members while others are truly clandestine operatives.

 

That means that the large majority of Antifa's followers have very little or no knowledge of either the existence of the inner cells or who are members.

 

Thank God we are finally denouncing, actively pursuing, and prosecuting violent and unlawful members of White supremacist organizations. 

 

But things only are going to get worse if we do not go after the violent and unlawful radicals on the left as well.

 

And the first step is telling the American people the truth.

What We Missed at the Revolution

 What We Missed at the Revolution

BOOK REVIEW:

'King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation' by Scott Anderson

Ray Takeyh, FreeBeacon 

Since 1979 numerous scholars and journalists have tried to explain why the Iranian people revolted against their monarch. Most books touch on the same themes: A diffident monarch pretending to be a strongman faced an unexpected revolt and wilted. America was too distracted by other crises and too confident in Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to focus on the monarchy's collapsing ramparts. And yet, the blame game goes on. Who lost Iran has been one of Washington's favorite blood sports. Jimmy Carter blamed the CIA; the Republicans blamed Carter, and the Iranian exiles blamed everyone but themselves.

Scott Anderson's King of Kings is an engaging and most welcome account of this sordid affair. With his keen eye for detail and an ability to develop characters, Anderson takes us back to the streets and alleyways of Iran of the 1970s. His method is to tell the story through the prism of four primary characters. Ebrahim Yazdi, a naturalized American citizen who decided to leave his medical research in Texas for the more enthralling task of revolution. Two midlevel officials in Washington: State Department's Iran desk officer Henry Precht and National Security Council aide Gary Sick. In Iran, he pays much attention to the colorful Foreign Service officer in the provincial city of Tabriz, Michael Metrinko. Other characters fade in and out, but the core four remain a constant.

A revolution is an impossible phenomenon to predict ahead of time. Even as it unfolds, one cannot understand its full dimensions and its destructive potential. The signs of discontent in Iran were all too obvious: class cleavages, massive corruption, and out-of-touch elite. The economy was sputtering at a time when the shah needed resources to sanction his rule. But these things were evident in other societies that did not have a populist revolution. It would require a particular degree of prescience to predict in 1978 that a monarch who had ruled for over three decades would simply whimper and fold.

Anderson can be a bit harsh in his censure of America's political class for failing to see the coming revolt. The fact is that the CIA routinely chronicled the many problems in Iran. And it is hard to read astute journalistic accounts such as Frances FitzGerald's "Giving the Shah everything he wants," in the 1974 edition of Harper's, without appreciating that not all that glittered in Iran was gold. In both the government and academy, most observers of Iran concluded that the monarch who had survived so many crises could manage the convulsions provoked by a relentless modernization drive. This was not an outrageous conclusion.

And then there was Iran's own secret service, the SAVAK. Anderson pays less attention to the Iranian side of the ledger. Paradoxically, the Islamic Republic has been generous to historians. It has published a 19-volume collection of SAVAK files pertaining to the revolution and covering the period from October 1977 to February 1979. SAVAK was hardly just a torture chamber, and its vast surveillance network picked up substantial troves of information. Its eyes and ears were everywhere including in the mosques. It knew what was being said and who was saying it. But under the banner of liberalization, the shah allowed for criticism without knowing how to channel it in the right direction. And when things got out of hand, he wandered the halls of his palace asking Western envoys why his people had turned against him.

The process of telling a story through characters makes for good reading but as a work of history is not without its limitations. Ebrahim Yazdi was not an important member of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's inner circle. The cagey ayatollah only trusted his own former seminary students and like-minded clerics. Gary Sick and Henry Precht may have represented the warring NSC and State Department perspectives, but sometimes midlevel officials are just that. And Metrinko was an intrepid Foreign Service officer stuck in the boonies.

The one individual who is curiously missing from this book is Jimmy Carter. Considered to be a detail-oriented president, Carter could manage many crises at the same time. Indeed, by the fall of 1978, Carter and his senior aides were fully engaged on the Iran issue. And yet there is little here on how Carter saw the revolution that would eventually devour his presidency.

To be fair, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski does come in for his share of criticism for his hawkish perspective, but not so much other officials who managed the file at the highest levels of government. Warren Christopher, deputy secretary of state, was frequently the lead official on Iran at the State Department given that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance preferred less contentious topics. And Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a firm supporter of the hawkish Brzezinski, is barely mentioned.

Anderson largely agrees with the prevailing view that the Carter administration was a house divided against itself. These divisions presumably led to mixed messages thus compounding the shah's confusion. But by November, Carter had settled on a firm course of action and repeatedly sent emissaries to Iran urging the monarch to crack down. It was the shah who rejected all these entreaties for restoring order. Too many Americans have unwisely accepted the Pahlavi diaspora's claims that Carter bears principal responsibility for the collapse of the monarchy. In the end, the shah was too soft-hearted to govern Iran. His clerical successors would display no compunction about shedding blood.

Another figure unfairly treated by Anderson is America's last ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan. It has long been the conceit of many chroniclers of the revolution that Sullivan was too enamored of his view that the revolutionaries and the armed forces could somehow be reconciled. His "Thinking the Unthinkable" cable outlining these views stands as one of the most famous diplomatic dispatches of our time. It is suggested that Sullivan was too busy pursuing his own plans to pay attention to his superiors in Washington. This was certainly the view of Carter, who often contemplated relieving his envoy. The charge is wrong and unfair.

Sullivan had strong opinions, and he ran a tight ship in Iran. His judgment was certainly not flawless. He was good at diagnosing the Pahlavi elite that he dealt with and understood their limitations. As with most Americans, he could not understand revolutionaries waging a struggle on behalf of God. But whatever his personal perspective may have been, he was never insubordinate. The documentary record indicates that Sullivan discharged his instructions with integrity even when he disagreed with them. Sullivan and CIA's chief Iran analyst Earnest Oney were the only two officials to get fired because of the revolution. And neither was at fault.

King of Kings is an important and engrossing account of a revolution whose reverberations continue to haunt the Middle East. It will not be the last word, as the argument shall and should go on.

Failed Lower Court Revolt

The Failed Lower Court Revolt

Federal judges on the East and West Coasts–not in flyover country–are blocking nearly every action taken by the Trump Administration.

Josh Blackman, Civitas Institute

Shortly before President Trump began his second term, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a not-too-subtle warning: the incoming administration might ignore Supreme Court rulings. Roberts was right that the high court’s ruling would be discarded, but Trump is not to blame. Indeed, the Trump Administration stated in absolute terms that it would follow every facet of Supreme Court decisions. For better or worse, Trump has tied his fate to the Nine. 

Rather, we are witnessing a remarkable shift in the lower courts. Federal judges on the East and West Coasts–not in flyover country–are blocking nearly every action taken by the Trump Administration. In some cases, judges are issuing emergency orders within hours, without even reading all the briefs. And through procedural rules, they can insulate their rulings from any appeal for up to a month. Due to forum shopping, federal courts of appeals within driving distance of an ocean invariably affirm these orders. 

The Trump Administration has only one possible recourse: the United States Supreme Court. Much has been written about the so-called “shadow” or emergency docket. But the simple truth is that unless the Supreme Court intervenes at an early point–what Justice Brett Kavanaugh calls the “interim before the interim”–inferior court judges will basically have the final say over executive power. And to be clear, it is the Constitution that calls them “inferior” judges. Inferior courts sit below the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has declared that “[U]nless we wish anarchy to prevail within the federal judicial system, a precedent of this Court must be followed by the lower federal courts no matter how misguided the judges of those courts may think it to be.” Yet, in the view of a majority of the Supreme Court, anarchy by the inferior courts is reigning supreme. Consider three recent lines of cases.

The first line of cases involves the executive branch’s power to deport. Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. considered whether the government could deport certain aliens to South Sudan, which is known as a “third country.” Right on cue, a federal judge in Boston blocked the removals. As a result, federal immigration officials were forced to hold the aliens at a military base in the African nation of Djoubti, because the judge ordered them to stay put. On June 23, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling, allowing the deportations to proceed. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. Yet, remarkably, the lower court didn’t get the memo. Mere hours after the Supreme Court ruled, the Boston judge declared that another one of his earlier rulings “remain[ed] in full force and effect” notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s order. Indeed, the judge cited Justice Sotomayor’s dissent as authority. 

The Department of Justice filed an unusual “motion for clarification” with the Supreme Court. The filing stated that the Boston judge’s ruling was “a lawless act of defiance that, once again, disrupts sensitive diplomatic relations and slams the brakes on the Executive’s lawful efforts to effectuate third-country removals.” On July 3, the Supreme Court reversed this lower court, again. Most judges can go their entire career without a single ruling reaching the Supreme Court. However, this judge was reversed by the Supreme Court twice within a span of two weeks. The Supreme Court recognized that the lower court may have “failed to give effect to an order of this Court.” But the Court assumed that the lower court would “now conform its order to our previous” ruling. Even Justice Kagan felt compelled to speak up. She did “not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.” It shouldn’t take two Supreme Court orders for a Boston judge to figure out how to proceed. But this case is not an anomaly.

The second line of cases involves the President’s power of removal. Since taking office, President Trump has fired a number of officers in the executive branch. In some cases, the law stipulates that the President can only dismiss them for good cause. Trump has argued that these restrictions unduly infringe on his executive removal power. For more than a decade, the Roberts Court has issued a series of rulings that support Trump’s claim. Yet, in case after case, lower court judges blocked Trump from firing these officers, and in some cases, ordered reinstatement. In February, the Supreme Court managed to duck the removal power issue in Bessent v. Dellinger. But in May, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Wilcox. This case all-but-signaled that Trump has the power to fire members of the “independent” National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board. The short order stated that these members “exercise considerable executive power,” implying that Trump should have the power to fire them. Wilcox was paradigm-shattering and is poised to transform the balance of power between Congress and the President. 

Yet, in Trump v. Boyle, a judge in Maryland ruled that Trump could not remove members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The judge buried Wilcox in a footnote. Once again, the Solicitor General filed an urgent appeal. DOJ claimed that the Maryland judge “adds a new twist by challenging this Court’s authority.” Three weeks later, the Supreme Court would agree. On July 23, the Supreme Court explained that it meant what it said in Wilcox. The Supreme Court was incredulous that the lower court could distinguish Wilcox. The Court’s short order stated that Boyle “does not otherwise differ from Wilcox in any pertinent respect.” Justice Kagan dissented, but she did not defend the Maryland judge’s ruling. 

The third line of cases involves DOGE. The Trump Administration has sought to cut a wide range of government spending. Under longstanding law, litigation over government spending is heard in the specialized Court of Federal Claims. It is not possible to waltz into a local federal district court. Yet, blue states had other ideas. In Department of Education v. California, the state of California argued that the Trump administration could not cancel certain funding items for education. A federal judge in Boston agreed. You might ask why California sued in Boston, rather than in California. As liberal as the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is, the Boston-based First Circuit is even further to the left. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that these cases should be heard in the Court of Federal Claims. Indeed, this ruling seems to have reversed a prior Supreme Court ruling, which found that a federal judge in the District of Columbia could consider a cut to USAID funding.

The California ruling was straightforward enough. The first question any judge should consider is whether a case belongs in his court. Not so. Once again, a judge in Boston ordered the government to pay out certain DEI grants. That judge ruled that the California decision was “not final,” was “without full precedential force,” and “agree[d] with the Supreme Court dissenters.” And once again, on July 24, the Department of Justice filed another emergency appeal. The Solicitor General rejected a “lower-court free-for-all where individual district judges feel free to elevate their own policy judgments over those of the Executive Branch, and their own legal judgments over those of this Court.” 

About a month later, on August 21, the Supreme Court mostly reversed the Boston court in NIH v. APHA. The Court, by a 5-4 vote, ruled that under California, the Boston judge lacked the power to consider this case. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the deciding vote, agreed that this dispute about the funding cut belonged in the Court of Federal Claims. None of this should have come as a surprise. California signaled loud and clear that these cases do not belong in a Boston courthouse. 

Justice Gorsuch wrote a striking concurrence, which Justice Kavanaugh joined. Gorsuch squarely rejected the lower court’s attempt to duck California: “when this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.” Gorsuch added that “This Court’s precedents, however, cannot be so easily circumvented.” No more California dreamin’.

In each of these three lines of cases, perhaps the lower courts in good faith thought the Supreme Court’s ruling did not dictate a particular outcome. After all, in all three cases, dissenting members of the Supreme Court would have upheld the lower court rulings. Maybe these judges, after careful reasoning, concluded that the Supreme Court’s orders were narrow, or interim, or not meant to settle all controversies. Some of these issues are fairly complex, and the Supreme Court’s short orders do not spell out much reasoning. Or perhaps there is another rationale to explain what is happening.

I’m skeptical. In these three lines of cases, the dissenters do not always defend the lower court on the merits, but instead focus on the fact that the Supreme Court’s intervention is not justified. Moreover, as Justice Gorsuch pointed out, these rulings are not outliers. The Boston judge’s “failure to abide by California [was not] a one-off.” The government pointed out in its emergency brief that “District-court defiance of this Court's decision in California has grown to epidemic proportions, as courts have issued nearly two dozen decisions asserting jurisdiction over claims challenging grant or funding terminations since California.” As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, shame on all of us.

What can explain these lower court decisions? During the first Trump Administration, federal judges found that Trump no longer deserved the so-called “presumption of regularity.” Under this presumption, courts will generally defer to the actions taken by a particular president as if they were regular actions taken by any president. But not for Trump. His tweets were too mean. Even if a specific action may be upheld if taken by another President, Trump, in particular, should not be afforded that deference. As soon as Trump began his second term, federal judges resumed their skepticism of everything Trump does. But what’s different this time is that the Boston Brahman of the judiciary, determined to save the rule of law, are pushing back against the Supreme Court itself. Again, perhaps if there were only one or two of these rulings, they could be chalked up to good faith disagreements. But the breadth and scope of these rulings are unmistakable. 

Perhaps we can make an addendum to this concept of the presumption of regularity. No President can actually lose this presumption. This deference is afforded to the President by virtue of his victory in the election; nothing his administration says or does can affect that presumption. But federal judges lack any such accountability. I think the Supreme Court is telling lower federal judges–especially in Boston–that they have lost the presumption of judicial regularity. And so long as they issue rulings that do not faithfully follow precedent, the Supreme Court will feel compelled to intervene on the emergency docket. As Justice Gorsuch explained, “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.” 

We should be grateful that the Supreme Court stopped this failed lower court revolt. Chief Justice Roberts seems partially committed to this cause. He joined the majority in D.V.D. and Boyle, but not in NIH. I think the Chief Justice should worry far more about a revolt from the lower courts than resistance from Trump.‍

Josh Blackman holds the Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law at the South Texas College of Law Houston and is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook. 

Bullying SilencesCommon Sense

 

Bullying Silences Common Sense

Minnesota carnage shows how ‘pro-trans’

bullying silences common sense

 Daniel McCarthy, New York Post 

Before Robin Westman murdered two children and wounded many more at Minneapolis’ Annunciation Catholic School, Robin was Robert, a troubled teen whose mother worked for the parish.

Robert’s mother approved the change, but after Robert became Robin in 2020, the teen’s psychological problems obviously didn’t go away: They led, five years later, to carnage.

A serious discussion of transgenderism, mental illness and violence is long overdue.

Earlier this year, the “Zizians,” a cult notable for the transgenderism of its leader and many members, made headlines for its alleged involvement in a series of homicides, including the January slaying of US Border Patrol agent David Christopher Maland.

Violent symbolism has lately taken a prominent place in transgender discourse:

The June 19 issue of Oregon’s Eugene Weekly features a trans cover star cradling an AR-15-style rifle, with a blurb proclaiming “Some queer folks are armed and ready to bash back.”

In the state where Westman would later open fire on schoolchildren, Minnesota Lt.-Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat, has appeared in public wearing a shirt emblazoned with a knife and the legend, “Protect trans children.”

No one can say Westman didn’t receive enough protection. The trans killer’s victims were another matter.

Even liberals who generally support transgender protections should now consider whether blatant warning signs might get ignored in cases like Westman’s for fear that noticing them would be politically incorrect.

The left’s urge to defend anyone who claims to be transgender can lead to making excuses for disturbing behavior that may not have anything to do with gender dysphoria.

All children are deserving of protection, and that includes protecting them from adults who have a reckless drive to affirm any doubts a minor has about his or her identity. 

The dangerous situation kids face today has come about because too much abnormality and political radicalism has been accepted for the sake of being polite.

Shortly before Westman’s rampage, I encountered an illustration of this phenomenon.

A libertarian scholar at a college in a red state griped on Facebook about a Florida school district that terminated the contract of a teacher who used a student’s “preferred” name — that is, a name signaling a change in sex — in school.

This was a scholar I thought of as middle-of-the-road or slightly conservative, so I was shocked by the argument: It came down to the claim that calling a child by any name he or she wants to be known by should never be controversial — why, it’s just like using a nickname.

As if calling William “Billy” is the same as calling him “Barbara.”

Florida’s law is, in fact, quite liberal — it allows transgender-affirming names to be used in school as long as parents provide explicit permission for the change.

The Brevard County teacher flouted the law and seized a role only parents are supposed to have.

Minors are minors precisely because they cannot make the most important decisions for themselves: They have to be under an adult’s tutelage — mainly their parents’.

Yet even a red-state libertarian intellectual, who should have been against a public-school teacher’s usurping of parental rights under any scenario, believed these public employees should have more power over a child’s identity than parents — and need not be accountable to the law.

This is sick.

A teacher encouraging a child to adopt a new sex is at least as heavy an intrusion into the child’s development as a teacher urging a pupil to change religion.

It’s also an invitation to grooming, if a teacher can lead a minor down this path just by claiming the pupil took the step.

If liberals and libertarians want to keep the state out of a child’s religious formation, how can they say it’s OK for state employees to get involved in deciding a child’s sex?

The radicalism of the idea didn’t surprise me — I expect the far left to advocate such things.

But this Facebook post told me I had seriously underestimated the extent to which far-left ideas had seeped into everyday discourse.

What was even more striking was the way this academic tried to smuggle through the acceptance of an extreme idea — letting teachers re-gender minors on their own authority — under the cover of something as banal as calling anyone by a preferred nickname.

Every state in the Union needs laws like Florida’s: Parents can certainly make mistakes, but safeguarding their rights is the first step to safeguarding children.

And parents themselves should be watchful — not only for signs a teenager’s troubles run deeper than pronouns, but for signs adults are contributing to a psychological crisis.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.

Red Menace

 

Red Menace 

Why China Poses a Real Threat to Our Democracy

Mike Watson, The Free Beacon 

This country's political class has argued furiously for the past few weeks about the latest alleged threat to our way of life. Democrats like the governor of California charge that the Texas legislature's "gerrymandering" maneuver is a severe blow to American democracy. Some claim this redrawing of congressional districts to benefit Republicans in the midterm elections could even sound the death knell of elected government in the United States.

Yet it is hard to see how a political tactic named after James Madison's vice president, Elbridge Gerry, and that has been used continuously for more than two centuries is suddenly a dire threat to the republic. Another story that emerged this week reveals a far greater threat: Communist China's infiltration of American politics.

The New York Times released this week an explosive story about China's influence over New York City politics. The Gray Lady reports that the Chinese Communist Party has coopted many of the city's traditional Chinese-American associations. They reward politicians who dance to China's tune and defeat those who offend Beijing by, among other things, meeting with Taiwanese officials or speaking out about Hong Kong. The campaign manager of one candidate who drew their ire told the Times that some community leaders advised the aspiring city council member to run ads holding a Chinese flag "to show what side she's on."

Many ethnic groups promote ties between their country of birth and their country of choice, and it is natural that some Chinese Americans would do the same. But lying to the IRS about political activity, as 19 of these groups reportedly have, is an entirely different matter.

This is not the first time the CCP has messed with the Empire State. One of Governor Kathy Hochul's top aides is being prosecuted for, among other things, freezing out Taiwanese officials and diverting attention from the Uyghurs, whom the U.S. government designated as victims of a genocide in western China. Other Chinese citizens have been convicted of stalking and harassing Chinese exiles in the United States as part of the CCP's "Operation Fox Hunt."

The campaign of subversion extends far beyond the Big Apple: In San Francisco, diaspora groups harass and intimidate human rights protesters. Others lobby local governments in Southern California to adopt pro-Beijing policies.

These episodes reveal a key element of the CCP's strategy to turn Americans against each other and prevent them from speaking openly and honestly about the greatest foreign threat facing the nation. Ever since its founding, the CCP's "United Front" organizations have infiltrated its rivals and undermined them. The United Front turned Chiang Kai-shek's army against itself and contributed to his utter defeat in China; the CCP hopes that its United Front will have similar results in the United States.

These kinds of attacks are particularly hard for Americans to defend against. For one thing, the Constitution protects speech, association, and petitions to the government, so some of these tactics are hard to prosecute. Attempts to crack down on pernicious foreign influence, moreover, invite charges of McCarthyism. Some of those accusations are made in bad faith, but as members of Donald Trump's national security team discovered when they were scapegoated and fired this spring because of their ancestry, McCarthyism lingers on in the dark corners of American society.

Joe McCarthy was fonder of the bottle than of the truth, and the real spy catchers like Whittaker Chambers kept their distance from him. But he became a nationally consequential figure because the Communists had clearly infiltrated some of the most important parts of the American government, as Chambers revealed in the case of Alger Hiss. Attempts by the East Coast establishment to downplay the espionage threat empowered figures like McCarthy.

Fortunately, patriotic Americans today are doing important work to protect the country from these kinds of subversion. Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) describes the problem well in his latest book, Seven Things You Can't Say About China. Organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council educate state and local governments about the steps they can take to protect themselves and their constituents.

Beijing wants to control how Americans think and speak, and will not stop until the consequences of its activities become too enormous for our democracy to continue. Exposing these agents of influence, prosecuting those who break the law, and making their Chinese masters pay a price is the best way to safeguard the republic and its citizens.

The Southern Surge in Education

 

The Southern Surge in Education

Frederick M. Hess, National Review 

These four states have a lot to teach the country about teaching

It’s been a grim stretch for America’s schools. Reading and math achievement are in a decade-long swoon. This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) yielded the worst fourth-grade reading outcomes in 20 years, with 40 percent of students scoring below basic proficiency. For eighth-graders, reading scores hit a historic low — with 33 percent below basic. Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism is way up, as are grade inflation and misbehavior.

At this point, the nation’s most popular K–12 reform is the push to let families opt out and choose new schools. There is, however, one notable good-news story when it comes to school performance that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves: A handful of red states are making notable gains — and putting their big-spending peers to shame. Their success has come to be called the Southern surge.

On the new NAEP (better known as the Nation’s Report Card), just two states, Alabama and Louisiana, had math or reading scores higher than what they were in 2019, pre-Covid. When researchers at the left-leaning Urban Institute adjusted 2025 NAEP results based on state demographics, Mississippi fourth-graders topped the country in math and reading. Louisiana’s fourth-graders led the nation in reading growth for the past two NAEP cycles and rank fifth nationwide for math growth. In fact, the two states were in the top four in every category. These accomplishments have taken many by surprise, perhaps because of a habit of imagining the South as a cultural backwater

The Education Recovery Scorecard, a Harvard-Stanford research collaboration, tracks how well states are making up academic ground lost after 2019. The most recent results offer an eye-popping portrait of the Southern surge: Alabama was first in math recovery and third in reading recovery; Louisiana was second and first, Mississippi sixth and fourth, and Tennessee third and ninth. Chad Aldeman, a respected education analyst and old Obama hand, makes clear the extent of the “Mississippi miracle,” noting that Mississippi’s black students “rank third nationally, and its low-income kids outperform those in every other state.” Mississippi is the “only state to see gains across all performance levels over the last decade. Its average went up, but so did the scores of its highest and lowest performers.”

What’s driving these results? A commitment to basic skills, especially through phonics-based early-literacy instruction, and rigorous classroom materials.

During Carey Wright’s nine-year tenure as state superintendent, which started in 2013, Mississippi adopted a series of early-literacy reforms that drove its remarkable gains. Under the 2013 Literacy Based Promotion Act, Mississippi embraced phonics, held back third-graders who couldn’t read, adopted literacy training for teachers, and provided literacy coaches for its worst-performing elementary schools. In 2016, it began requiring new elementary school teachers to pass the Foundations of Reading assessment, while identifying struggling readers via a universal screener administered three times a year in grades K–3. Teachers also work with parents to create individual reading plans for each struggling student, diagnosing specific skill deficiencies and spelling out appropriate interventions.

In Louisiana, K–3 teachers and elementary school leaders are now required to complete training in the “science of reading,” an approach to early literacy that relies heavily on cognitive science research and emphasizes phonics, vocabulary, and oral reading fluency. Superintendent Cade Brumley notes, “We banned three-cueing systems, which is a reading approach that prompts students to draw on context instead of sounding words out.” Matthew Levey, a curricular expert, has reported that Louisiana’s knowledge-rich Bayou Bridges program “knits together history, geography, civics, and economics to build student knowledge and literacy skills in grades K–8 . . . [giving] students plenty of opportunities to learn complex vocabulary and ideas and use them in context.”

In Alabama, the 2019 Literacy Act required nine hours of science-of-reading training for K–6 teachers. Like Mississippi, Alabama mandated that K–3 teaching candidates pass the Foundations of Reading assessment. The act also required schools to develop intensive summer reading camps, which provide 60 hours of instruction to the lowest-performing students. Last year, more than 30,000 struggling readers attended, and half caught up to grade level by summer’s end. In 2022, the legislature moved to build on this success via the Numeracy Act, requiring math coaches in every elementary school while creating the machinery to vet math materials and improve teacher training.

Of course, it’s no coincidence that the Southern-surge states reopened schools during Covid even as blue-state schools remained tightly shuttered. By September 2020, most schools in Mississippi and Tennessee were open for in-person instruction, as were half of Louisiana’s schools. (When Louisiana schools chief Brumley was informed that the legislature wanted to keep schools closed in the fall of 2020, he walked out after telling them, “If you’re going to keep schools closed, you’re going to do it without me.”)

Leaders in these states show an admirable, dogged focus on results. When I asked Brumley about his state’s gains, he sounded more like a hard-bitten SEC coach than a high-flying education reformer. He said, “The results validate our work, but we know that too many students still can’t read on grade level, too many perform poorly in math, and too many are in schools that are failing them.” He added, “We can’t be arrogant when there is still too much work to do.”

Despite all of the good news, the Southern surge remains unfamiliar to many. As Karen Vaites, a New York–based education advocate, observed this spring in the Phi Delta Kappan, “this year’s NAEP results were grim, and — predictably — every publication covered them.” But that coverage left something out. “By this point, I would have expected to see more stories about the Southern Surge,” she said, “but I’m not.”

Why haven’t you heard much about the Southern surge from advocates, academics, or the mainstream media?

For starters, the approach isn’t sexy. It’s about basic skills, hard work, and rigorous instruction. That doesn’t make for a great news hook. There’s also the reality that contempt for red states and the Deep South is perhaps one of the last acceptable forms of prejudice. The notion that Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama are the states where policymakers are fighting for poor kids or taking the science of learning seriously just doesn’t compute for cosmopolitan progressives or the education professoriate.

Moreover, to the consternation of so many advocates, academics, and union honchos, the Southern surge teaches an inconvenient lesson about school spending. In Louisiana, between the 2014–15 and 2023–24 school years, after-inflation spending increased 27 percent, to $17,500 per pupil. Spending was up 8 percent, to $12,500, in Mississippi; 5 percent, to $12,600, in Tennessee; and 14 percent, to $13,200, in Alabama. This is not a story of big bucks. Consider that in Illinois, per pupil spending was $21,700 in 2023–24, up 19 percent over the past decade. In Massachusetts, it was up 19 percent, to $26,100; 30 percent, to $19,000, in California; and 12 percent, to $31,514, in New York. For those convinced that the key to school improvement is always more money, the Southern surge is, shall we say, unhelpful.

Media disinterest is especially troubling because too many states are heading in the wrong direction. Crippled by the excesses of “equity”-minded reform, blue-state schools are abandoning even the pretense of educational rigor. Last fall, Massachusetts voted to eliminate the state’s graduation tests, dismantling three-decade-old legislation that had fueled a generation of academic achievement. Starting with the class of 2028, New York will no longer require high schoolers to pass Regents Examinations in English, math, science, or social studies to earn a diploma. Instead, students will complete projects to show that they’re creative innovators, critical thinkers, effective communicators, global citizens, and so on. California has moved to eliminate advanced math classes through tenth grade in the name of equity, while Oregon has done away with its graduation tests for the same reason. Blue states are not just lagging, they’re backpedaling.

For parents, educators, and public officials alike, the Southern surge offers several straightforward lessons.

First, it’s the fundamentals, stupid. Education is a field that has proven itself highly vulnerable to fads and grifters. Simple solutions that rely on discipline, rigor, demanding expectations, and hard work just don’t sing out to those who seek quick fixes or shortcuts. The emphasis needs to be on academics rather than on gauzy notions of “global citizenship” or “self-guided learning.” The Southern surge is a testament to the importance of taking literacy, numeracy, and evidence seriously.

Second, curriculum matters. Schooling frequently involves battalions of ill-equipped teachers making it up as they go along, with most reporting that they find a goodly chunk of their instructional materials online (via platforms like Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers). Wonder how something like the 1619 Project made its way into so many classrooms, even with few school systems officially adopting it? There’s your answer. Now, some amount of DIY lesson-planning is inevitable. But most teachers don’t have the requisite time, training, and experience to do a lot of it, or to do it well. Southern states are taking aggressive steps to support teachers and curate materials.

Third, strong school leadership is coherent and sustained. School reform often amounts to a constant churn of initiatives that educators deflect by closing their doors and telling one another, “This too shall pass.” In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, you don’t see this. Instead, there’s a series of reinforcing policies and practices that point in the same direction. These states aren’t subjecting educators to the whiplash and fad-chasing that are the hallmarks of “reform.” Chaos turns out to be a lousy recipe for school improvement.

Finally, while conservatives have long struggled to connect with teachers, these red states offer an appealing model of professionalism. Teachers have more clarity about expectations, support for the work they do, and confidence that they’ll inherit students who are literate and numerate. Louisiana, which has rolled out a comprehensive education policy agenda called Let Teachers Teach, may be the best example. Devised with the input of a few dozen respected Louisiana teachers, the agenda calls for placing ungovernable students at alternative sites, abolishing antiquated lesson-planning requirements, reducing the burdens of mandated teacher trainings, and so forth. This is how states can drive school improvement while winning teachers’ trust.

More than a generation ago, a passel of Southern states led an earlier era of school improvement, spearheaded by governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Jim Hunt in North Carolina, Lamar Alexander in Tennessee, George W. Bush in Texas, and Jeb Bush in Florida. These efforts, featuring a commitment to accountability and school choice, gave rise to robust NAEP gains in the late 1990s and the first decade of this century that took academic achievement to new highs. Now, there’s another good-news story brewing down South. And this is one sequel that deserves our close attention.

This article appears as “The Southern Surge” in the October 2025 print edition of National Review.

FREDERICK M. HESS is the director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Freaks Unleashed

 

Freaks Unleashed:

Fired ‘Mainstream’ Journalists Prove They Never Belonged on Television

Stripped of their fancy titles and fat salaries, they're just another drop in the cesspool of internet cranks

Andrew Stiles, Freebeacon 

It's been a rough few years for deranged left-wing hacks masquerading as "mainstream" or even "relatively sane liberal" journalists. In an effort to recapture a modicum of respectability, failing media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC have sought to purge their ranks of mindless partisans who seem incapable of forming an original thought that doesn't involve Donald Trump and the word "fascist." Time will tell if cutting these freaks loose will be enough to save these floundering companies, but in the meantime, the fired journalists keep reminding us why they never deserved our respect.

Joy-Ann Reid lost her job (and multimillion-dollar salary) at MSNBC earlier this year on account of her terrible ratings. Even the liberals at MSNBC thought her unhinged rants and racial grievance-mongering were too toxic for TV. Reid, whose Harvard degree significantly undermines the university's reputation for academic excellence, was widely ridiculed for wondering why Latinos did not prefer to be called "Latinx," and for expressing disbelief that Kamala Harris could lose the 2024 election after waging a "flawlessly run" campaign and being endorsed by Queen Latifah.

Since getting fired, Reid has launched a Substack page where she charges $8 per month for access to enlightening content such as, "American gestapo," "The Republican war on democracy," and "When we call them fascists, it's because they ARE." Her rants have grown increasingly unhinged and racially charged in recent days. During a recent appearance on The Left Hook podcast with Wajahat Ali, a radical socialist who used to appear on CNN and write for the New York Times, Reid denounced white people as an inferior race.

"They can't originally invent anything more than they were ever able to invent good music," she fumed. "We black folk gave y'all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll. They couldn't even invent that, but they have to call a white man [Elvis Presley] the king."

Reid posted a video from the podcast on her Substack under the headline, "How Mediocre White Men and Their Fragility is [sic] Destroying America with Joy-Ann Reid." In another video that raises troubling questions about Reid's mental health, the disgraced journalist ranted deliriously at the "unqualified" white Republicans who are "deleting all the blacks and brains [browns?] and making sure that they all get deported and locked up so that they don't have to compete."

We hope she gets the help she needs.

Jim Acosta "resigned" from CNN earlier this year, turning down a humiliating demotion to the graveyard shift from midnight to 2 a.m. Acosta made a name for himself during the first Trump administration as that annoying guy at press conferences who wouldn't shut up, and became a minor celebrity with virulent Trump-haters over the age of 65. Acosta also launched a Substack page where he charges $8 per month for access to exclusive interviews with respected newsmakers such as Molly Jong-Fast, Beto O'Rourke, Judd Legum, Lev Parnas, and Steve Schmidt.

Earlier this month, Acosta united liberals and conservatives in disgust after he published an "interview" with an AI-generated version of a child who died in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. Acosta asked about gun control, and the AI bot "said" he favored the same vague policies endorsed by Democratic politicians. Even users of Bluesky, the social media app for lunatics who think MSNBC is too right-wing, thought it was an appalling stunt, even by Acosta's low standards. "You are a fucking monster," one user wrote in response. "An actual opportunistic ghoul."

John Harwood was a relatively respected journalist who wrote for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and CNBC. He was even allowed to moderate a Republican primary debate in 2015, which he opened by asking Trump if he was running a "comic book version" of a campaign. It was later revealed Harwood had reached out to Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, for suggestions on what to ask the GOP candidates. He also complained his fellow journalists were spending too much time talking about Hillary's emails, and attacked Republicans for "veering off the rails."

Harwood's anti-Trump derangement grew increasingly vitriolic over the years, especially after joining CNN in January 2020. He compared the GOP to the "old Confederacy" and suggested Trump supporters would "smack their moms in the face" to please the president. He lavished praise on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats. He denounced Republicans for pushing "false" claims about Joe Biden's fitness to serve. "The gears of his mind are working," Harwood said in June 2022, several months before Biden attempted to converse with a dead congresswoman.

In 2024, Harwood became a contributor to Zeteo. He writes a weekly column for the online publication, which was founded by Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC host whose show was canceled due to anti-Semitism. Zeteo charges $12 a month for access to Harwood's insightful commentary about how Trump is "objectively bad for America" and "behaving like a gang leader." His most recent column—"How White Resentment Fuels Trump’s Openly Racist Agenda"—echoes the paranoid rantings of Joy Reid. "After decades of fitful attempts to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the federal government has now made catering to and protecting whites its organizing principle," Harwood writes in the opening paragraphs. Only subscribers can read the rest, but who wants to pay for that shit?

In a way, it's somewhat refreshing to watch these former "mainstream" figures debase themselves. Stripped of their fancy titles and exorbitant salaries, the likes of Reid, Acosta, and Harwood have revealed themselves to be no different than all the other Trump-addled internet posters shrieking into the void. That they were ever taken seriously as journalists is a damning indictment of the media class, and a major reason why Americans' trust in journalistic institutions is at an all-time low.