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NOVEMBER 20-21,  2022

RON SOARS:  Governor DeSantis is making a clear impact on Republican voters.  Trump beware.  From The Hill: 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is closing the once-yawning polling gap with former President Trump as he inches closer to a 2024 White House bid.

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey shared exclusively with The Hill on Monday put DeSantis’s growing strength into stark relief: Since last month, the Florida governor’s standing in a hypothetical 2024 Republican primary improved by 11 points, bringing him up to 28 percent.

Trump’s support, meanwhile, plummeted 9 points to 46 percent. While he still holds a double-digit lead over DeSantis, the poll marks a drastic shift in the former president’s political strength as he embarks on his third campaign for the White House in six years.

“Month after month DeSantis has been rising and now he is cutting significantly into Trump,” Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, said. “If they both run, this will be quite a race and Trump could well lose.”

Trump announced last week that he would once again seek the Republican presidential nod in 2024, making good on something he has been hinting at since he left the White House nearly two years ago.

While he had hoped to launch his campaign from a position of strength, the announcement came at a time when a growing number of Republicans are questioning his influence in the party and whether he’s the right candidate to carry the GOP into the next election.

That’s due, in part, to the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections. The so-called red wave that Republicans had long predicted ultimately failed to materialize. While the GOP clinched a narrow majority in the House, the party failed to recapture control of the Senate, and several high-profile candidates endorsed by Trump lost their races.

Since October, Trump’s overall favorability has fallen 5 percentage points. The latest Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey found that 44 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of the former president, while nearly half — 49 percent — view him unfavorably.

COMMENT:  All the polls and stories I've seen point in the same direction – that the former president is losing standing in the Republican Party.  Republicans appear to be looking to the future, not to the past, and Ron DeSantis is a governor who's a proved executive and ferocious vote getter.
The Republican bench is deep, the Democratic bench doesn't exist.

November 20-21, 2022       Permalink

WE MUST STOP THIS:  The purpose of our military is to prevent wars through deterrence, and, if wars break out, to win them.  But that isn't necessarily what our service personnel are being taught.  The truth is shocking, and dangerous to this country.  From Fox: 

The Biden administration has launched extensive diversity and equity initiatives in the military that have popularized elements of critical race theory and gender identity and significantly weakened the U.S. Armed Forces, according to a report obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital.

"Our military’s singular purpose is to ‘provide for the common defense’ of our nation," the report said. "It cannot be turned into a left-wing social experiment. It cannot be used as a cudgel against America itself. And it cannot be paralyzed by fear of offending the sensibilities of Ivy League faculty lounges or progressive pundits.

"The world is a dangerous place, and the Biden administration’s insanity is eroding our greatest source of security in it."

The report from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, details how the military has allocated resources to root out extremism within its ranks as it promotes predominantly left-wing ideas on race and gender. This includes documentation on how military employees promoted critical race theory and espouse anti-White views.

For example, less than a month after his appointment by President Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin directed commanding officers and supervisors at all levels to schedule a day to discuss extremism. But a report from the Biden administration, "Countering Extremist Activity Working Group," later identified fewer than 100 cases of extremism from the 2.1 million active forces, a rate of .005%.

The report finds that instructors at military academies use "antiracist" approaches to education that direct soldiers to center their understanding of American society on an acknowledgment of its racist past and present, the report said. The Department of Defense, however, has emphasized it does not teach critical race theory and is focused on challenging its military students intellectually and rooting out extremism.

Rubio said these race-based initiatives are a distraction and danger to American security.
"Rather than making the case for American greatness and protecting our nation, the military is parroting woke nonsense," Rubio told Fox News Digital. "It’s dumb, it doesn’t work and it’s dangerous. We need to spend more time thinking about how to counter Chinese aircraft carriers and less time thinking about pronouns."

COMMENT:  This is hard-left infiltration of the American military.  Our whole future as a nation may well rest on removing this stain from our fighting forces.  I hope the new GOP House majority will do its part, and quickly.

November 20, 2022       Permalink

NOVEMBER 18-19,  2022

FIRST THE GOOD NEWS – FROM COLLEGE FIX:  

More than 1,000 professors across the country have signed the “Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration” that calls on universities to restore free speech, academic freedom and institutional neutrality.

The open letter calls on universities and professors to adopt and implement the “Chicago Trifecta” — the Chicago Principles on unilateral free speech, the Kalven report that requires institutional neutrality on political and social topics, and the Shils report, making “academic contribution the sole basis for hiring and promotion.”

As of Thursday the letter had 1,095 signatures, and it increases daily.

“The larger hope is to bring back academic freedom on campus and in the academic enterprise more generally,” Stanford economist and co-author John Cochrane said in an email to The College Fix. “Only with robust academic freedom, the ability to investigate ideas and bring out uncomfortable facts, does scholarship bring about new and reliable knowledge, especially on crucial issues to our society.”

The loss of academic freedom, the letter states, is tied to a leadership crisis.

Many university leaders want to uphold free speech yet “punish those who express views deemed to be incorrect and enforce ideological conformity in hiring and promotions,” it states.

Underscoring the problem is the fact that purse strings — funding resources — are tied to following the accepted narrative instead of a free exchange of ideas, Cochrane said.

“[A]cademic freedom, free speech, and the pursuit of scholarly excellence are under siege at universities, in professional societies, and in government agencies, including those that give grants,” Cochrane said. “Simple facts cannot be spoken out loud. Research that comes to conclusions that counter political narratives can’t be conducted, published, or popularized.”

The declaration signers call on their universities to implement the “Chicago Trifecta” to help resolve that problem: “Freedom is a culture, not merely a set of rules, and a culture must be nurtured.”

Cochrane, on his Grumpy Economist blog, recently pointed out that some academics are scared to sign the letter because other signatories have been labeled as “well known deplorables.”

“That reaction tells us a big part of the problem,” he wrote. “All along we have tried very hard to reach out to self-described left/liberal/democrat colleagues, who privately bemoan what’s going on but are too afraid to be seen in public. But why not fix it: if some of you sign perhaps that will give courage for more of you to sign. Take it over, get together with your friends, add lots of signatures, make this your cause, prove that we can stand together for freedom!”

UC Berkeley statistics Professor Will Fithian told the Daily Californian student newspaper via email that he signed the declaration because “I have heard from many students and colleagues that they are afraid of openly discussing controversial issues.”

COMMENT:  We wish them well.  As the Chinese say, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  It will be a long, bitter fight to restore our universities, and success is not guaranteed.  The other side is littered with Marxist garbage and quick fixes.  The dissenter is risking his career.  But we have some heavy firepower as well – especially a new generation of parents who are taking a renewed interest in their children's education, right up to the college level. 

The market will play a critical role here.  If a new generation of parents and students starts rejecting wokeness and its branches, wokeness may well fade away. 

November 18-19, 2022       Permalink   

WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST – FROM DAILY MAIL: 

The American Bar Association voted to drop the LSAT and other standardized tests as requirements for law school admissions. 

An ABA panel made its decision on Friday after noon after a committee recommended the testing requirements be scrapped because they hurt diversity in admissions.

The LSAT, or Law School Admission Test, estimates a prospective students reasoning and reading comprehension, and it serves as a predictor on how they will fair in classes. 

The ABA's ruling will take effect in the fall 2025 semester, after a final determination from the association's Hose of Delegates in February.

Despite its ruling, individual law schools are still free to require an admissions test. 

The ABA's move comes as Yale and Harvard withdrew from US News & World Report's law school ranking system, criticizing its heavily reliance on LSAT and GRE testing scores that they argued hurts low-income applicants. 

The woke law schools argued that many lower scorers on the LSAT can't afford exam prep courses and guides, and schools that admit the poor test takers are penalized by ranking lower on the prestigious US News list. 

However, proponents of the tests fear that dropping the exams altogether may not actually help promote diversity but instead benefit wealthy applicants. 

ABA’s House of Delegates has two opportunities to reject any proposed changes to the law school accreditation standards before they become final, meaning that the legal education council would have the final say.

The House of Delegates thwarted the same rule change in 2018. The council approved removing the testing requirement but withdrew it just moments before it was to be considered for final approval by the House of Delegates.

Despite the ABA panel's vote on Friday, half of 82 law schools in the US recently polled by Kaplan Testing said they would keep the tests, with only four saying they would scrap them. 

Kaplan, which has a financial interest in school requiring the tests as they offer prep courses and guides, said 37 of the 82 schools polled did not know what they would do if the ABA drops the testing requirements. 

The respondent pool included 12 of the top 25 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, according to Kaplan, which did not identify respondents' answers by school name. 

COMMENT:  Standardized tests should always be looked at for their fairness and relevance, but when you say that a test "hurts diversity," you are condemning an entire class of people by the use of codewords.  The idea here is to develop innovative methods of test preparation, a worthwhile financial investment that will give applicants more of a fighting chance. 

November 18, 2022     Permalink