The SPLC And Debanking: Then And Now

On August 15, 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center called "debanking" a "conspiracy theory". The SPLC's assertions did not age well. As reported by Yahoo! Finance: 

    The Comptroller of the Currency says the nation's nine largest banks denied financial services to customers based on their political, religious, or social beliefs, according to a regulatory review released Wednesday. 

 [snip]

    The federal banking watchdog determined that the banks' sweeping internal guidelines lacked objective, risk-based criteria, effectively shutting out legitimate customers and businesses based on ideological leanings rather than financial risk.

    The OCC said its findings reveal a systematic effort within the banking sector to restrict access for politically sensitive industries through both public and nonpublic policies.

    Federal regulators found that lenders restricted certain sectors' access to financial services, including oil and gas exploration; coal mining; firearms or ammunition manufacturing or distribution; construction or operation of detention facilities; and the manufacturing, distribution or online retail of tobacco or e-cigarettes.  

It is notable that, per this Life News article, the SPLC is indirectly implicated in "debanking" as at least some of the banking institutions relied on SPLC materials to discriminate against certain businesses. From the article:

    JPMorgan Chase’s WePay closed the account of a religious organization after it was designated an “extremist hate group” by the SPLC; internal notes described it as a “right wing religious conservative non profit with strong anti LGBTQ rhetoric.” WePay also closed an account used by a devout Christian to fund a legal challenge to anti-discrimination laws.

    PNC denied a line of credit to a media company in part because an owner funded Christian conservative groups the SPLC had labeled hate groups. Wells Fargo pressured a payment processor to end service to a religious nonprofit over its views on same-sex marriage.

    These actions followed the circulation of a report titled “Bankrolling Bigotry: An Overview of the Online Funding Strategies of American Hate Groups.” The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network emailed it to leaders at major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank.

    Drawing on Southern Poverty Law Center designations, the report falsely listed pro-life and Christian organizations—Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, the Family Research Council, the Ruth Institute, and the American College of Pediatricians—alongside white nationalist, white supremacist, and Holocaust denial groups. It urged platforms to restrict their access and recommended that Congress consider stripping them of tax-exempt status. 

And from a New York Post article about the OCC findings:

Banks regularly used hate group designations from the Southern Poverty Law Center to debank customers. The SPLC was indicted in April on federal fraud and money-laundering charges, with prosecutors alleging it defrauded donors of millions of dollars. FBI Director Kash Patel has described the non-profit as a “partisan smear machine.” 

Communist Protests Spread In Europe

 Like many of you, I've been trying to follow the news of the widening "student" protests in France. It was clear from the start that the protesters--or the vast majority of them--were not ethnically French. And, in fact, this video confirms that they are mostly second and third generation invaders migrants. But just as the leftists in the U.S. have determined that the path to power means aligning with Muslims, so seems to be the case with the French protests. In this article from Fox News--"Behind France's student riots: Communists, unions and a global propaganda network"--we see a similar strategy and some of the same names. An excerpt:

    From France to the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Greece and India, adults with deep pockets are tapping France's school protests and turning a domestic education dispute into a platform for broader political and ideological confrontation. BreakThrough News is a pro-communist propaganda outlet based in New York City, funded by an American-born, Shanghai-based communist tech tycoon, Neville Roy Singham, who has financed a network of communist and far-left groups in the U.S. that have capitalized on grievances to stoke similar street unrest for almost a decade.

    A Fox News Digital investigation traces how a movement that the media is mostly framing as students protesting deteriorating school conditions is actually part of an extensive infrastructure of unions, communist activists, far-left political parties and international media organizations that are organizing demonstrations, calling strikes, mobilizing supporters and broadcasting the unrest around the world with "BREAKING" alerts.

    In a digital analysis of scores of news articles, social media posts and public statements, Fox News Digital has identified 50 organizations in the French student protest movement and its wider network of supporters and international amplifiers, revealing an activist ecosystem extending far beyond the students who launched the demonstrations.

    Of the network of 50 groups, 15 are student or youth groups, including several communist youth movements and a Muslim student association.

    The remaining 35 adult groups include a dozen labor unions; eight communist or socialist organizations; five groups spanning other issues from taxes to parental advocacy, environmental activism, economic justice, international media and diaspora organizing; five civil-rights or human-rights groups; four political parties, including La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed, and the French Communist Party; one Palestinian advocacy group that complete the "red-green" alliance of leftists with Muslims. 

There is a reason that communism is also referred to as international socialism.  And not well this observation: "The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: far-left activist networks amplify protests around the world, then package the unrest as evidence of a growing global uprising." In any event, there is a lot more in the article, including further discussion of the ties to Muslim groups, so read the whole thing.

    It appears that this protest movement is spreading, with violent protests having been staged in Belgium. Le Monde reports that "Brussels' riot police clash with protestors against backdrop of student protests," relating:

    Hundreds of people faced off with riot police in the streets of Brussels on Friday, October 9, in chaotic scenes on the sidelines of a workers' march. Some 30,000 people turned out for a national day of action against government austerity measures, police said, with tensions running high after days of student protests.

    Police said the main trade union rally in the city center went ahead peacefully but that "groups of troublemakers were responsible for serious incidents before and after the march." Officers deployed water cannon and tear gas after being targeted with sticks, bottles, paving stones and incendiary devices, police said.

    Gangs of youths were playing cat-and-mouse with police in the streets around the main international rail hub at Gare du Midi in particular, lighting fires and vandalizing bus stops across the area. Two buses were attacked – their windows smashed and seats ripped out after the passengers were evacuated – while youths set fire to trash cans, rental bikes and scooters.

And Axios reports that there have been calls for similar protests across Europe, including in Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Austria, although the article disclaims any connection or organizing force behind the protests. 

Don't Mistake The Left's Evil For Stupidity

Over the past six months, I've seen various articles reporting that professors with the University of California system have called for a return to using standardized testing for college admission. For instance, in late June, Campus Reform reported that "[o]ver 1,500 STEM faculty across the University of California system, including 53 department chairs, have signed an open letter to university leadership calling for the university system to reinstate standardized test requirements in the admissions process, citing students’ lack of competency in high school math concepts." 

    “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” the letter reads. “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields.”

    The letter attributes the decline in student readiness to the University of California admissions system’s 2020 decision to eliminate standardized testing requirements, arguing that test scores provide a critical measure of student ability, particularly at a time when applicants can use artificial intelligence to assist in writing their college essays.

    Accordingly, the letter calls for school administrators to implement several changes to the admissions process—including reinstating test score requirements for prospective STEM students and giving STEM faculty a larger role in determining standards for student readiness.   

But Leftists are pushing back. For instance, George Leef cites to a New York Times editorial by Miriam Pawel that argues that California does not need the SAT. Leef explains:

    [Pawel] acknowledges the criticism that has recently been lodged by faculty members throughout California that large numbers of students are entering college with ridiculously weak academic backgrounds—so much so that professors must teach basic high school math. Professors in the University of California system are pleading for the restoration of the SAT to screen out students who are terribly deficient in mathematics preparation. 

    But to Pawel, the low level of math preparation is not important. What is important, she argues, is getting “underrepresented” students into top universities and through to their degrees. The problem with the SAT is that it screens out many of the “diverse” students she thinks are vital. Admitting “underrepresented” students makes the university more diverse and that, according to progressives like Pawel, is a key element of social justice. The SAT, she believes, gets in the way of inclusivity. That view fails to consider the students who are excluded.  

Leef points out the obvious: admitting "one student because his or her ancestry has been deemed 'underrepresented,' ... also means that another student must be excluded because his or her group is not one that adds 'diversity.'" He argues that "[t]here is no justification for labeling some students as 'diverse' (and therefore beneficial) and others 'non-diverse' (and therefore dispensable)"; but that "[i]nstead of seeking 'diversity' and 'inclusiveness,' it would make far more sense for universities to figure out how to identify applicants who have both the academic aptitude and the desire to study what they offer." 

    Leef's comments make sense and, in comparison, Pawel's seem foolish or stupid, even. But it would be a mistake to assume that just because Leftists advance ideas and policies that are (to any normal person) stupid, that the Leftists themselves are being stupid. In his piece, "Correctly Understanding the ‘Stupidity’ of the Left", Greg Salsbury warns against underestimating Leftists or giving them an excuse for their destructiveness, explaining:

    We don’t tend to think of stupid people as evil. Perceived stupidity neutralizes perceived intent and, to some degree, perceived blame. “Stupid” is not the word that comes to mind for figures like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, and it would have done us no favors to describe the Axis powers in World War II as merely stupid or crazy.

    Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended. But what if the opposite is true? What if the policies are producing precisely the disruption their architects sought? 

 In that regard, he reminds his readers: 

    As has often been the case with radical leftist movements in the United States, their stated objective is to dismantle existing American institutions, traditions, and governing structures in favor of a fundamentally different social order. Put simply, they despise America as it currently exists. Once you understand this premise, their positions look less like harebrained, stupid, illogical, or unworkable ideas, but as carefully conceived, sometimes ingenious tactics, intended to advance that larger objective.

    In this light, things like defunding the police, draconian regulations and carbon taxes, mothballing coal and nuclear plants, wide-open borders, turning a blind eye to Medicaid and NGO fraud, supporting genital mutilation of minors, opposing voter ID, massive expansion of entitlement spending, lowering combat readiness standards in the military in the name of gender equality, and support for adversaries like Hamas can be understood not as disconnected examples of incompetence, but as elements of a broader ideological program. If it does damage to America and hastens the great realignment, they support it.

    Whether one agrees with that interpretation of any particular policy is a separate question. The important point is that conservatives shouldn’t automatically assume destructive policies are the product of stupidity. 

In that light, the objections to using standardized tests in admissions is not stupid if you realize it is part of an overall strategy of undermining the Unites States and the economic futures of white Americans. 

Satan Welcomes Home One Of His Own

The Daily Mail reports that feminist “icon” Gloria Steinem has died at 92. 

Shades of Epstein: Hayden Panettiere Trafficked At Age 18

Seems like a rite of passage in Hollywood. From the New York Post: "Haunting Hayden Panettiere interview about being betrayed and sex trafficked at age 18 resurfaces after her death." Key bit:

    A haunting interview in which Hayden Panettiere talked about being betrayed by a friend and sex trafficked to a “very famous man” on a yacht at age 18 has resurfaced after her death on Sunday.

    The troubled actress, who died of suspected cardiac arrest and overdose at age 36, described being “basically told to perform sexual acts” when she was still an up-and-coming child star.

    Panettiere said the unidentified female friend was somebody she “had grown to trust and see as a protector” before she led her onto the boat when she was 18.

    “There was no hints of anything like that happening, so it took me by surprise,” she said.

    Panettiere made the comments on the May 11 episode of Jay Shetty’s podcast, “On Purpose with Jay Shetty.” 

Annals of Corruption: Fauci's Pay-to-Play Scheme

The College Fix states that "Fauci’s ‘pay-to-play scheme’ both ‘unlawful’ and ‘unethical,’ Rutgers expert says." 

    New documents released by Senator Rand Paul detail Fauci’s “side hustle,” which include winning millions of dollars in cash prizes. Fauci would solicit his allies who also received federal funding from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to nominate him for prizes.

    Some of the solicitations occurred during the nationwide COVID lockdowns that were created at the prompting of Fauci.

    He also instructed federal staffers to work for him to find prizes and manage the application process, including one that netted him $900,000.

No wonder he needed a blanket pardon. 

Is AOC The Democrats' Next Chosen One?

Those of you old enough to remember when Obama came on the scene probably remember how he quickly went from a complete unknown outside of Chicago to the head of the Democratic party ticket as though he had been chosen for the role. I'm seeing pundits make similar predictions about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Certainly she seems to be modifying her rhetoric to make her more palatable to the national electorate. Scott Pinsker has some thoughts about this in his piece, "The Cunning Genius of AOC’s ‘Woke’ Reboot." He warns:

    Tread carefully, Republicans: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is still America’s most dangerous Democrat — and still the odds-on favorite to win her party’s 2028 presidential nomination.

    And if she captures the nomination, there’s (roughly) a 50%-50% shot she’ll win the White House. Don’t underestimate her: She’s media-savvy, camera-friendly, photogenic, and her PR instincts are as sharp as Sardinian swords.

And his example of this is her recent comments attempting to downplay "wokeness":

    Consider how deftly she just rebooted the “woke” narrative.

    Because woke is a joke in 2026: Woke is cringe, woke is dead, woke is done. 

    Other than the fringiest of the fringe, nobody takes it seriously anymore. ...

[snip]

    The excesses of wokeism are legion. A lesser politician would’ve tried to relitigate this or recalibrate that. 

    But AOC knew better. 

    Instead of polishing a turd and pretending it’s chocolate, she acknowledged overreaching, killed the old narrative, and set the stage for the “new and improved” version 2.0.

    Remarkably, she did it in a single sentence.

Pinsker goes on to note that by this, AOC "signaled a willingness to learn, grow, adapt, and change," which will be critical on a national stage because she will come across as an open-minded pragmatist because of her ability to grow and change. 

    Dace Potas also poo-poos AOC's retreat from "Woke 1.0" in an op-ed at USA Today. He concludes:

The existence of "Woke 1" implies that a "Woke 2" is already in the works. From what I can tell, it isn't all that different in substance, just strategy and rhetoric. Progressive candidates will keep being haunted by Woke 1.0 for as long as they run for office, unless they explain – explicitly – why this time is different. Otherwise, voters will see right through it. 

And he explains:

    To anyone paying attention at the time, woke was a lot more than “a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice,” as AOC put it back in 2021, when she wanted those positions taken seriously.

    Among the excesses of Woke 1.0 was a movement aimed at defunding or abolishing the police, gender reassignment surgery for minors, the insistence that men can menstruate, justification of rioting, racial discrimination in hiring and much, much more. 

    Not every progressive held each of these positions, but as a collective, they were fine letting them enter the political mainstream. By her own admission, AOC described Woke 1.0 as an attempt to shift the Overton window, the range of ideas considered acceptable in mainstream political debate.

    “During this time, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” AOC said. “We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns, and I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place, and I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

    But it was more than that. Progressives pushed corporate America into diversity, equity and inclusion mandates that indoctrinated employees and built a cancel culture that met dissent with job losses and charges of bigotry.

    Even progressives who didn't believe the most extreme positions were incentivized to promote them, since it made their own positions sound reasonable by comparison. Instead of "abolish the police," mainstream Democrats arrived at "defund." Instead of "abolish borders," many arrived at "abolish ICE."

    In any event, the pivot from "Woke 1.0" is all show. To the extent there is a "Woke 2.0" it will be far worse than anything we have seen so far; just as Obama's idea of "racial healing" was to stoke racial hatred against whites. Over at the Battleswarm Blog, Lawrence Person points out:

    There was no “Woke 1.0,” just a continuous racialist, anti-Western Civilization, anti-rational, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-Republican movement whose roots stretch back into the Comintern, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, carried forward into the Port Huron Statement, the Weather Underground, the campus radicals of the 1960s and their long march through academia and other western institutions, special campus victimhood identity politics carve-out departments for blacks, Hispanics, radical feminists and “Queer Theory,” into the political correctness of the 1980s that blossomed into the poisonous flowers of social justice, radical transsexism, Palestinian- and Islamo-felia and anti-Israel animus that has turned into full-blown antisemitism, and a radical fringe in the Democrat Party that metastasized to its core under Obama and President Autopen. AOC’s Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow-travelers were all on-board with their lunacy every step of the way.    

[snip]

    And throughout it all, the SJW/DSA types were onboard with all of it, every step of the way. There was no “woke 1.0,” there was only the same madness taking on new forms.

    You didn’t regret it then and you don’t regret it now, you only regret getting caught. ...

[snip]

    You don’t regret any of the pain you inflicted on normies, you only regret not getting to inflict more of it. You still view yourself as the natural anointed rulers of those benighted rubes in JesusLand.

 Like other socialists before them, the DSA and its adherents truly believe "[e]verything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State". And they intend on controlling the State. Stalin blamed the Kulaks for the ills of society; Hitler blamed the Jews; and the modern Leftists blame white people. We've seen this play before and we know how it ends. 

The Truth Shall Set You Free--Unless You Are James Comey

From Matt Margolis at PJ Media: "Bombshell Declassified FBI Document Blows Up Everything We Ever Heard About Russiagate." From the lede:

    For years, Democrats and their media allies swore up and down that the FBI's investigation of Donald Trump was a serious national security investigation, launched only because of grave concerns about Russian collusion. Newly declassified FBI records tell a different story. It turns out that the bureau formally opened its full counterintelligence investigation into Trump back in 2017, and used his firing of FBI Director James Comey as the justification.

    The president exercised his constitutional authority to fire an FBI director, and the FBI responded by opening a counterintelligence investigation into him.    

More On Elite Overproduction

Peter Turchin's theory of elite overproduction being behind revolutions shows up in another article. In his Breitbart piece, "Peter Schweizer: One Third of Democrats Now Call Themselves Socialists," Sage San Martin writes:

    Besides being overwhelmingly white, the DSA’s voters are “largely Millennials who don’t remember history and did not grow up during the Cold War,” he says. “They grew up with prosperity, and they have no understanding of the failings of socialism, whether it’s the Soviet variety, the Cuban variety, the Venezuelan variety, or the Angolan variety,” Schweizer says.

    Schweizer also mentions the theory of “elite overproduction,” which an academic first theorized in the 2010s. “When revolutions take place, they are generally led by people who think they belong in the elite. So, they get the training, they get the education, and they have the family background. And then, when they try to get into the elite, they realize that they’re not going to make it and they get angry,” Schweizer says.

    “So, they blame the American system. They blame capitalism, and they take their anger out politically on the system, rather than maybe engage in some self-reflection and realize that they’re all not all that they think they are,” he adds.   

Interesting times. 

Traitors: Retired U.S. Generals Consulting For China

Natalie Winters writes about "Top American Generals Joined a CCP Spy Front's Backchannel Pushing China’s Military Agenda in Washington. Some Ended Up on China’s Payroll." As she points out: 

    The Chinese Communist Party did not need to penetrate the Pentagon to gain access to America’s military leadership.

    It built a private network around it.     

The program, she reveals, was called the Sanya Initiative (and, later, the “U.S.-China Military-to-Military Dialogue”); and it brought together "some of the most powerful retired officers in the United States participated in closed-door meetings with senior Chinese military leaders" to discuss "Taiwan, the South China Sea, missile defense, cybersecurity and the future of relations between the two militaries." She names names, which include a bevy of former top generals of the various branches of the military as well as chairmen or vice-chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it didn't stop there:

According to the foundation’s own brochure, they met:

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen

• Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell

• Rep. Rick Larsen

• Rep. Mark Kirk

• Adm. Timothy Keating

• Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle

CUSEF published a photograph of the Chinese and American generals meeting Clinton in Washington.

 And it appears that lasted, with only a few years skipped, between 2008 and 2024. 

Fauci's Holocaust

Kevin Downey Jr. has a piece over at PJ Media entitled "COVID-19: Fauci's Holocaust." And I think he is spot on in his observations laying this at the feet of Fauci. Some of the points raised in the article:

COVID was nothing less than a modern-day Holocaust.  It killed roughly seven million people worldwide. Economies crumbled, and trillions of dollars were lost. Families were kept apart on holidays. We watched our grandparents die alone on tablets. Funerals were either not allowed or limited to 10 people. Children didn't go to school, creating years of educational and emotional damage they still feel today.

[snip]

 The COVID virus and the responses were some of the most evil, premeditated tactics humans have ever wrought upon mankind. What we also endured was a years-long propaganda-fest that would ideologically tear families apart, cost people their livelihoods, and have people at each other's throats in what many were duped into believing was an existential threat to everyone on the planet.

 Here's what we know:

• Fauci decided to sidestep restrictions on gain-of-function research in the U.S. so, through grants and contracts, pursued gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• There, researchers created the COVID-19 virus which, whether by accident or deliberately, was released, quickly spreading in China and, thence, to the rest of the world. 
• Fauci's diary states on February 8, 2020, that he believed that COVID's fatality rate at 0.2-0.3%, but on March 10, he stated it was 10 times higher, which lie he repeated in testimony to Congress.
• He was a key figure urging the lockdowns, notwithstanding that COVID was no more fatal than seasonal flu. And he "admitted in his diary that he convinced elected leaders to continue the lockdowns for as long as he deemed necessary."
• He was a key figure behind mask mandates although he knew that the masks did nothing to prevent the spread of the virus 
• He used the lockdowns as a way of forcing people to get the vaccination.
• And he did all of this for fame, money, and self-aggrandizement.  

VIDEO: Fauci Is Toast

Mark Dice has a video montage showing Dr. Fauci contradictions and misinformation, as well as the useful idiots that believed his pronouncements. I am disappointed, however, that few people seem to be focusing on his statements in his diary that Covid would have lethality rates about that of seasonal flu, and then a short time later publicly stated that it would be ten times worse.  

 VIDEO: "Dr. Fauci is TOAST"
Mark Dice (17 min.)

No, He Should Be Hung

Yuri Bezmenov: "Fauci Should Be in Jail, Not Georgetown." Excerpt:

Dr. Anthony Fauci committed crimes against humanity for ruining countless lives. He perjured himself lying about everything from the lab leak, school closures, and COVID mandates including the jab that never stopped the spread. Yesterday, he plead the fifth. In addition to his $400,000/year government pension and taxpayer-funded security, Dr. Anthony Fauci is now a Distinguished University Professor of “The Science” at Georgetown. 

NYC Mayor Shows His Communist Bona-Fides

One of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's plan is for city-owned grocery stores that will supposedly offer prices 30% below retail prices on a core basket of goods. The stores will be operated by one or more grocery chains, but subsidized by the City. The current plan is to open five of these stores in the poorest neighborhoods in the five boroughs--areas that are currently served by mom-and-pop run bodegas. Consequently, and this is what proves Mamdami's communist bona-fides, "Taxpayers will subsidize Big Grocery to help put mom & pop bodegas out of business, and make the city's poorest residents more dependent on Big Government than ever."

The Grooming Gang Scandal In The UK Is Worse Than Anyone Thought

Rupert Lowe, a member of parliament in the UK, conducted the investigation that the UK government refused to do. His report is here. I haven't had time to read it (it is 219 pages in total), but there is this from the executive summary:

    The Rape Gang Inquiry examined the systematic targeting of vulnerable girls, overwhelmingly White British, by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs across towns and cities throughout the United Kingdom. The evidence put to the Inquiry confirms that this scandal constitutes one of the most horrendous failures in the history of the country. Organised networks of perpetrators built coordinated operations that transported victims between locations, supplied them with drugs and alcohol, recorded abuse for distribution and blackmail, and passed girls between multiple adult men. These crimes have been committed for decades, since the 1950s by Pakistanis in particular, and have affected every region of our nation.

    The scale of the crimes committed is staggering. It has been previously established that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma.1 The true number is probably higher. The perpetrators bear primary responsibility, yet the institutional failures that enabled them for decades must also be confronted. In court records and official inquiries, around 87% of those convicted in these group-based child sexual exploitation (‘CSE’) cases bore distinctively Muslim names.2 The vast majority of men involved in these gangs were not convicted. Dr. Taj Hargey, an imam with the Oxford Islamic Congregation, believes the true proportion of gang members who are Muslims to be around 95%.3 This figure far exceeds the Muslim share of the overall United Kingdom population. The overwhelming majority of the rape gang networks consisted entirely of men from Muslim backgrounds – predominantly of Pakistani heritage, although smaller groups from Somali, Iranian, Syrian, Turkish, and other Muslim origins were also involved.   

It appears part of the reason that nothing was done was because the victims were from the working class and held in disdain by authorities because of it.  Daniel Heneghan, writing on X, sums this point up:

    We have class issues in this country, though we deny it, but nothing like the deep loathing that the UK middle classes (not the upper classes) have for the working class. We are talking about the university credentialed class (used to be a lot smaller). A whole class of educators, officers, medical, engineers, managers. One life example, I recall on Youtube, an interview with a working-class electrician. In the engineering firm that we worked at managment/engineering never addressed him by his name, not his first name nor his last name (Mr. Raines, for example) but simply as "Sparks". "Hey Sparks, take a look at this....". He's an electricians, so "Sparks", get it. The intent was to alienated, even dehumanize, and it's still there working today. 

    Deep, deep, deep loathing. A loathing that was as deep as American racism at it's worst.

Well, to be fair, it exists here in the U.S. among much of the educated class. Having come from a working-poor background, I witnessed much of it first hand.

    But back to the UK grooming gang scandal, one of the questions that needs to be addressed is the government's policy of covering up what was going on. Instapundit linked to this article at the Pimlico Journal that delves into this issue: "Manchester Labour's Grooming Gang Complicity." But one item you should pay attention to are the comments about ethnic voting blocs:

Much has been said of the biraderi (or baraderi), clan dimension to South Asian local politics recently, and it is impossible to understand the political dynamics that led to the rise of figures like Ahmed and Akhtar without understanding biraderi. While this has become a more salient factor in political discourse by virtue of the breakaway of certain heavily Muslim constituencies to the so-called ‘Gaza Independents’ since 2024, in reality, it has been a known and relevant fact of local party politics for many decades. Academic interest in the phenomenon began to pick up in the 2010s as the surprise victory of George Galloway in the Bradford West by-election revealed that minority votes were not exclusively determined by individual loyalties to the Labour Party. In fact, it turned out that ‘elders’ and ‘community leaders’ were incentivised by established local politicians to make ethnicity-based and religion-based claims for their communities, and these ‘elders’ and ‘community leaders’ could return them with bloc votes — from which the victory of Galloway’s Respect and the more recent Muslim First parties are an aberration. This patronage system made such constituencies effectively unpollable, each a black box with dynamics comprehensible only to those with local knowledge.  

In short, though, as the article explains, it is is this political power and influence that enabled the gangs to continue without any real interference. The fear of upsetting "community relations" both acted as a damper on any criminal investigation and enforcement, while also serving as the excuse to promote key players into positions of authority over the police and other agencies that would have been charged with investigating the abuse of the girls. The author points out:

    One of the starkest failures appears to be in the fact that men like Akhtar were able to accumulate vast amounts of formal and informal power with few, if any checks. The web of relationships between the state, third sector, and ‘communities’ drastically increased the number of areas vulnerable to abuse. This is perhaps best illustrated by the data-loss saga which occurred in 2011. The council suspiciously failed to inform the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about the theft of twenty-one laptops holding important data on victims of Child Sexual Exploitation. A meeting of the council’s Corporate Governance Board and IT Governance Board, itself chaired by Akhtar, failed to record any minutes and was told that a report was being prepared to recommend that the Senior Leadership team should not file the loss with the ICO. In fact, it turned out the ICO only discovered the incident due to press reporting.

    Akhtar appears at every juncture in the Rotherham story and at every institutional pressure point: community brokerage, police liaison, youth and neighbourhood activity, licensing and regulatory functions, publicly funded community organisations, a major official inspection’s account of local fear and power, a CSE handover allegation, and the council data-loss scandal involving sensitive information. In fact, his own daughter’s employment came to light in 2019 when the charity she worked for, Rotherham Rise, was criticised for employing her in a senior role supporting victims of Child Sexual Exploitation. This is a remarkable mark on the town for a single individual and his family.

    He is representative of the wider problem: a total failure by the authorities, and sometimes outright collusion, in one of the worst atrocities ever perpetrated on British soil. It would be no surprise to discover hundreds of Jahangir Akhtars up and down the country, and no one, least of all in the Labour Party, has done enough to uncover the full story. Given the importance of baradiri networks as powerbrokers in (particularly) Labour local politics, it does not take much thinking to explain the reluctance of its senior politicians to upset the apple cart.  

We have seen a similar dynamic with the rampant fraud among the Somali community in Minnesota. 

    For my LDS readers, this should remind them of the various secret combinations (including the Gadianton Robbers) that arose in Nephite society in order to protect its members from prosecution and to gain political power and wealth. When I was a kid, there was few clear examples of this to point to outside of organized crime syndicates, but now it seems that nearly every month we are shown evidence of such groups permeating our society and government.   

Traitors

Breitbart reports: "Corporate Special Interest Launches ‘Quiet’ Lobbying Effort to Stop Trump’s Crackdown on Visa Overstays." 

    Corporate special interests, including the tech industry and the United States Chamber of Commerce, have launched a “quiet” lobbying effort against President Donald Trump’s crackdown on visa overstays, the Washington Post reports.

    Last month, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued a policy memo reiterating that, under “long-standing immigration law and immigration court decisions,” visa holders must apply to adjust status to a green card at consular offices outside the U.S.

[snip]

    In particular, USCIS is hoping to reduce the nation’s visa overstays by having temporary visa holders return to their native countries in order to apply for green cards. Prior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates have suggested that about half of the nation’s illegal alien population initially arrived on temporary visas and overstayed.

    “Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose. Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process,” Kahler said.

    Since the announcement, the Washington Post reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Immigration Forum, and other corporate special interest groups, including tech industry insiders, have launched a lobbying campaign to shield their foreign workforces from the rules set out in the policy memo.

It is all about replacing American workers either for cheaper foreign labor and/or to advance their own tribes over Americans. In either event, the behavior should be punished. 

SPLC's Role Of Spreading Hate To Empower The Left

 In "The Southern Poverty Law Center’s long-running scam is getting even shadier," David Harsanyi writes a bit about how the SPLC motivated its donors:

    The organization secretly paid informants to engage in actively promoting and funding racist groups, while denouncing and “fighting” the very same groups in public.

    The SPLC purportedly created fictitious entities to hide funding from their donors.

    It’s accused, for instance, of bankrolling the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, paying a leader nearly $300,000 to post racist messages, organize, and even transport people to the infamous Charlottesville protest, where one person was killed.

    In another instance, a pair of white supremacists who approached the SPLC about leaving the Ku Klux Klan were encouraged to stay in the group and recruit new members.

    The two men were given salaries and allegedly reimbursed for the costs of their activities, including those “incurred for cross-burning events, to include the wood and fuel used.”

But the SPLC's real perfidy, Harsanyi goes on to explain, is how it used its cachet to "destroy[] the reputations of legitimate organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with racism or extremism."

The purpose of the “hate” maps and enemies lists compiled by SPLC isn’t to alert Americans about local skinheads, but to associate those skinheads with conservative groups like the American College of Pediatricians, the Family Research Council, Turning Point USA, the American Family Association and Moms for Liberty. 

A Peek Behind The Curtain

Anonymous Conservative has linked to an article that has serious implications. From Raw Story (via MSN): "Epstein reporter 'fleeing the country' as home becomes target of alleged 'attacks'." From the article:

     Journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, whose reporting has uncovered a number of previously unknown revelations about Jeffrey Epstein, said on Thursday she will be “fleeing the country” after claiming her home was targeted in "attacks" by those she believes are "unhappy about" her Epstein reporting.

    Valdes-Rodriguez’s reporting has largely centered around Epstein's compound in New Mexico, formerly known as Zorro Ranch, that is reportedly central to the disgraced financier’s disturbing plot to “seed the human race with his DNA.” The compound is also alleged to be the burial site of “two foreign girls,” according to an FBI tip, and may have been used to surveil two U.S. nuclear weapons labs, Valdes-Rodriguez previously reported.

    “It appears my home has been located by, well, whomever is unhappy about my reporting about Zorro Ranch and the local cover up here and the military intelligence roots of the child sex trafficking operation Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were running here in New Mexico,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote earlier this week in a post on Substack.

     “This morning, I was hit in my home office by two episodes of what I later learned were likely Direct Energy Weapon attacks. Look up Havana Syndrome. My symptoms are consistent with such attacks, and entirely new. We wasted no time in leaving the house, for good.”  

But even that wasn't enough:

Valdes-Rodriguez said that she would be “staying in safe houses” indefinitely until her move out of the United States. However, on Wednesday, she claimed to observe suspicious vehicles driving outside her home, which she noted was on a cul-de-sac in a rural town that typically saw little traffic.

This is exactly the type of behavior that Anonymous Conservative has documented happening to him after he released his book on evolutionary biology and politics. 

Selling Off Access To Public Lands: The Oligarchs Versus The Rest Of Us

From High Country News: "The billionaires’ club at the center of America’s public lands fight."  The basic issue:

    At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property.   

[snip]

    The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club — an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.  

[snip]

    PERCHED MORE THAN 7,000 FEET above sea level, the Yellowstone Club was built atop former public lands acquired through land exchanges with the U.S. Forest Service in the 1990s. It has since converted more than 15,000 acres outside Big Sky into one of the most exclusive communities on the planet. 

    The club’s membership has included familiar names: celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton; tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt; and financial elites like Bill Ackman, Warren Buffett and Robert Herjavec. 

    Inside its gates, the Yellowstone Club has an 18-hole golf course, a concert venue, a movie theater, a dedicated fire department, hundreds of luxury homes and nearly 3,000 acres of private ski slopes. Initiation runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and an undeveloped lot inside the gate has sold for as much as $10 million, according to Forbes. 

    CrossHarbor Capital Partners, a Boston-based investment firm, bought the Yellowstone Club out of bankruptcy in 2009. 

    In the 17 years since, the firm has expanded its Montana portfolio — developed through a subsidiary called Lone Mountain Land Company — to become one of the largest luxury-resort footprints in the Rocky Mountains. 

The article mentions that some of the top government officials responsible for overseeing public lands themselves belong to the Club or have other conflicts of interest.  The article continues:

    “The landowners now have access to the public lands in a really exclusive way,” said Cleveland of Wild Montana. She said the exchange gives these landowners “easy access into that country where the public has to hike 20 miles of backcountry trail to get in there” and “opens the door to a much more realistic development scenario.” 

    The most contested piece of the deal was the trail network. Two historic public trails had appeared on Forest Service maps for more than a century. The exchange abandoned the public’s claim to both. 

    In their place, the Yellowstone Club agreed to pay for a new 22-mile trail on mostly public land, at a substantially higher elevation, as part of a 40-mile backcountry loop. 

    “Can you imagine elderly folks and younger folks trying to hike that,” asked Wilson on a visit to the future trailhead. “It’s not hiker friendly at all. Definitely not hunter friendly.”

    He looked up at the nearly vertical wall of shale rock where the trail is slated to start. 

    “It’s ridiculous,” he said.  

    Public lands used to be for the public. Even the National Parks and National Monuments, whatever other limitations were imposed on commercial development, largely remained open for public recreation. But then came the Wilderness Lands. These are the modern day equivalent of the "King's Forest" from feudal times. In theory they are open to the public for recreation, but the prohibitions on roads make them largely inaccessible except to the rich who can afford both the time and money to ride in on horses or fly into a handful of airstrips. 

    But it seems that it has become harder to designate additional wilderness. So what seems to be happening is for a federal agency--for instance, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or the Forest Service--to restrict access. 

    In my neck of the woods, I've seen the BLM sell off the land that has the roads to access certain area, leaving an "island" of BLM land surrounded by private land. Great for ranchers and for environmentalists, but not for the public seeking to access the land for recreation. The Forest Service, on the other hand, is simply not maintaining roads and trails and then closing them as being too dangerous. For instance, there is a wonderful hiking and camping area near my area, up past a reservoir, that used to have three main road leading into the area. The most accessible road suffered a landslide some time back and they simply never reopened it. The difficulty of reaching it from the other directions has severely restricted its accessibility. 

    Sometimes the private landowners will also sabotage access. The article mentions private land owners illegally blocking public roads or trails that crossed their land. I too have seen that, with ranchers putting up fences across public roads and trails on land they are leasing from the BLM. They are supposed to leave a means to go through--a gate or area of fence that can be moved--but more and more do not. One area I've enjoyed for hiking has a section of hiking trail that parallels a fence dividing the National Forest from some private land. This past summer, I found a tree that had been cut on the private side of the fence in such a way that it fell on the public side of the fence and lengthwise along the hiking trail blocking a considerable length. Other sections also had trees that had been felled to block or obstruct the trail. 

Related:

• "Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Sues Montana FWP Over Corner Crossing"--Outdoor Life.  That is, crossing into a federal land that is corner locked--where the only way to access the land is crossing at the corner from one piece of public land to the other. 
• "Senator Seeks to Transfer 140,000 Acres of Louisiana’s Only National Forest. Residents Are Furious"--Outdoor Life.  Per the article:

A draft bill attributed to a Louisiana senator’s office seeks to convey roughly 140,000 acres of the Kisatchie National Forest to the local government of Grant Parish in central Louisiana. That represents nearly a quarter, or about 23 percent, of the state’s only National Forest land. 

The excuse for the transfer is to help speed economic development, which sounds suspiciously like making it possible to eventually transfer the land to a developer.

DEI Spells DIE

In "Medicine Without Merit," Forrest Bohler describes his struggles to be accepted into medical school. Not because he wasn't qualified--he more than met the qualifications--but because so many spots were being reserved for less qualified minority applicants. He begins:

    When I applied to medical school in the midst of the pandemic and in the wake of the death of George Floyd, I had reason to think I was a competitive applicant, particularly for my state’s public medical school, which favors in-state candidates with strong academic records. I didn’t assume I was entitled to admission, but I thought I would get in somewhere. I didn’t.

    So I did what failed applicants are told to do: I sought feedback. Eventually, I spoke with an admissions officer at one of the schools that rejected me. He told me that I was extremely qualified and had everything the school looked for in an applicant. He said he couldn’t give me a concrete reason I wasn’t accepted, other than that I didn’t fit the demographic the school was prioritizing, and that other applicants were viewed as having “traveled a longer distance” to medicine. My application, he said, was evaluated through that lens.

    That conversation unsettled me in a way I didn’t immediately recognize. I was being told I was qualified, capable, and deserving but simultaneously that those qualities were not enough due to certain immutable characteristics. I had spent years learning about discrimination as something that happened to other people. Nothing in my education had prepared me to think that it could happen to people like me. 

    Then it did.

    Perhaps I should have seen it coming. The requirements for admission into medical school vary markedly depending on who the applicant is. According to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the academic thresholds required for acceptance differ substantially between racial groups. The average MCAT score of a white applicant who is accepted into a medical school is 512.4, approximately the 85th percentile nationally. By contrast, the average MCAT score for accepted American Indian applicants is 502.2 (56th percentile), for accepted black applicants 505.7 (67th percentile), and for accepted Hispanic applicants 506.4 (69th percentile).

    The disparities are even more pronounced when we look at the applicant pool as a whole. White applicants overall, including those who are rejected, have an average MCAT score of 507.8, roughly the 73rd percentile. In other words, accepted black, Hispanic, and American Indian medical students matriculate with lower MCAT scores, on average, than white applicants who have not yet been accepted to medical school. The same pattern appears when we turn to undergraduate GPA. White applicants apply with an average GPA of 3.7, but require an average GPA of 3.8 to gain admission, while accepted black, Hispanic, and American Indian applicants matriculate with average GPAs of 3.59, 3.66, and 3.64, respectively.

But admissions wasn't the end of it. He describes having to undergo DEI and "anti-Racist" indoctrination classes, as well as similar requirements at other medical schools. He was subjected to discriminatory language such as derogatory comments about "old white men" in medicine or questioning how his adoptive Asian sister could feel safe in a white family in Montana. Terms like fallopian tube was no longer acceptable because the name came from Italian anatomist Gabriele Falloppio--a white person. DEI activities were factored into consideration for awards and scholarships. 

    And the consequence is fewer white men in medicine. As the author writes:

In medical education, more diversity means fewer white men. In 2014, white men made up roughly 31 percent of US medical students, a figure closely aligned with their share of the national population. If the stated goal of equity initiatives in medicine were for the field to achieve roughly proportional representation of the national population, that number would not have been treated as a problem in need of correction. And yet, over the following decade, it fell substantially. By 2025, white men accounted for just 20.5 percent of medical students, a 30.6 percent decrease, placing the demographic well below its population share. 

But because medical training take so long, the consequences of admitting and promoting less qualified medical students had been delayed. As the author notes, "When those cohorts eventually emerge as attending physicians, the costs will be borne not by institutions or administrators, but by patients and by a profession that depends on competence to maintain public trust."

    Although Bohler was finally admitted and did very well, he nevertheless suffered the three prohibited practices of racial discrimination: harassment which created an uncomfortable learning environment, disparate treatment because he was white male forcing him to obtain additional post-graduate education before he was finally admitted, and disparate impact because of policies enacted to reduce the number of white male students. This seems like a case ripe for either a suit by the DOJ or a class action suit against the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME)--the group that accredits medical schools--the individual medical schools, and the specific employees or officials that engaged in the discrimination. In fact, over the long run, it might be better for the Federal government to take over accreditation from the LCME and then perhaps we could more medical schools and work on graduating more doctors.