Tag: politics

Law Students Threatened for Not Attending Mandated DEI Training: Report

Students at Southern Illinois University’s Simmons Law School were reportedly threatened with a “letter of reprimand” that would be placed in their permanent file if they did not attend a mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training session.

The reprimand letter could also be shared with the state bar, according to a report from the Daily Signal published earlier this week.

“Those who cannot attend in person typically fulfill the make-up expectations without issue,” an associate dean wrote to one of the students who didn’t wish to participate.

“If a student misses a required session and does not complete a make-up within a reasonable period of time, we typically issue a letter of reprimand,” the dean added.

The email was obtained by a parental rights group called Defending Education.

After multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, Defending Education obtained the message, which also said that the “letter is placed in the student’s permanent file and would be shared with the bar if the file is requested as part of the character and fitness process.”

In addition, other emails revealed that the university is teaching students that the law, and legal field, can be “racially discriminatory.”

The Daily Signal highlighted a specific part of the training that mentioned bullying.

One of the presentation slides read, “Bullying disproportionately affects traditionally underrepresented groups,” while another slide claimed “lawyers of color were bullied more often than white lawyers.”

Erika Sanzi, senior director of communications at Defending Education, told the outlet that the school’s tactics are “indefensible and embarrassing.”

“Threatening law school students with a letter of reprimand if they refuse to attend a DEI session they were deceived about is indefensible and embarrassing,” a statement from Defending Education noted.

This news comes just days after the council of the American Bar Association, which oversees law school accreditation in the United States, moved to change a rule that forces schools to support DEI.

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Judge Blocks DOJ Victim Restitution After Leftists Complained The Victims Were Conservatives

Afederal judge blocked the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion anti-weaponization restitution fund Friday after plaintiffs claimed the fund was politically discriminatory because it helped victims of Democrat administrations. The Department of Justice created the fund earlier this month to provide restitution for targets of federal political persecution regardless of political affiliation.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, an appointee of President Bill Clinton with a history of ruling against the Trump administration, temporarily blocked the Justice Department from establishing the fund while Brinkema hears legal arguments.

Andrew Floyd, a fired assistant U.S. attorney and Jan. 6 prosecutor, John Caravello, a professor who was accused and acquitted of assaulting a federal agent, the National Abortion Federation, and far-left nonprofit Common Cause sued the Department of Justice last week to stop the fund.

With seemingly no sense of irony, the plaintiffs’ primary claim is that the fund is politically discriminatory against Democrats, apparently because the lion’s share of potential victims seeking restitution would be conservatives targeted by the Biden and Obama administrations. The plaintiffs’ argument implies that, because Democrat administrations decided to conduct large-scale political persecutions of normal Americans they perceived as their enemies — and there is a much larger number in that victim pool — restitution should not be allowed.

“By its own terms, the Anti-Weaponization Fund is available only to claimants who assert that they were targeted by ‘Democrat’ administrations, even though the current administration has weaponized the awesome power of the federal government against its perceived political opponents like no other administration before it,” the lawsuit states. The suit declines to acknowledge how the Biden administration sent its federal thugs after Americans peacefully praying outside abortion facilities, or parents concerned about their children’s public schools, or Catholics who attend Latin Mass, or Jan. 6 protesters who were wildly overcharged and over-sentenced, and much more. It also does not meaningfully mention the Obama administration’s targeting of the Trump campaign, the Russia collusion hoax, or any other abuse that effectively stripped the American people of proper representation in the White House by kneecapping Trump’s first term.

Vice President J.D. Vance has said that the fund is open to anyone who believes he was unfairly targeted by the federal government, explicitly stating it was open to Democrats as well. Each claim, he said, would be decided on a case-by-case basis. A DOJ overview of the fund explicitly states that “Democrats can submit claims, too.” It also notes that the fund is for victims of “use of government power to target them for ‘improper and unlawful’ reasons,” without mentioning a requirement that a particular party have wielded the power.

Floyd, through public statements, may be inadvertently making the case for the fund, as he has been displaying the zeal with which prosecutors like himself wanted to punish Jan. 6 protesters.

“First, hundreds of people attacked the foundation of an ordered society by trying to stop the results of a free and fair election — committing serious assaults on law enforcement and other crimes as they did so,” he said. “Then, this administration pardoned them — removing the accountability that had been hard earned by victims, witnesses, law enforcement, and prosecutors and imposed by impartial jurors and judges. Now they are asking taxpayers to illegally reward them for their crimes.”

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Jessica Tarlov Accidentally Admits the Democrats’ Biggest Dirty Secret

How do Democrats feel about the new memoir from Jill Biden that’s coming out? Jessica Tarlov, the lone leftist on The Five, isn’t happy at all, and she made no effort to hide her frustration Thursday night. According to Tarlov, Jill is reminding the public of something she desperately wants the country to move on from.

“What makes this very difficult is it’s such an unfair test of elected Democrats, people in work, in Washington, rank and file Democrats, people who donate, who care about these election results,” Tarlov said. “Because we’ve already gone through it, right? Went through the 2024 loss, seeing all the autopsies, now trying to move on, you know, thinking about where the candidates best positioned to win these elections. Moving past having to talk about sundowning — well, at least for Joe Biden, we can talk about it for Trump — and then this is back for no reason. He falls asleep all the time.”

Greg Gutfeld laughed, and Tarlov wasn’t happy about it. “Do not laugh,” she said.

Gutfeld zeroed in immediately on one word Tarlov had slipped in: “sundowning.” She’d applied it to President Donald Trump in passing, apparently hoping it would slide by unnoticed.

“You’re calling Trump sundowning. That is rich — people know what that means,” Gutfeld said. “That is a symptom of Alzheimer’s. Just to be clear.”

There is zero evidence that Trump suffers from any cognitive decline or neurodegenerative disease.

Tarlov pivoted back to her core grievance. “It feels unfair, essentially, at this point, to the party, that if you want to cement any piece of your husband’s legacy, let people move on from this and win some more elections, and then they can point to things and say, like, we’re building on the successes that we saw under the Biden administration. That’s why we’re adding X, Y, or Z thing.”

It was a remarkably candid admission. Tarlov was essentially arguing that Jill Biden is torching whatever remains of Joe’s political legacy by forcing the country to revisit his decline at exactly the moment Democrats are trying to sell voters on a brighter future.

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Why Stable Systems Fail: The Illusion of Institutional Control

There is a persistent belief in modern political life that systems fail because they become fragile. Institutions, it is assumed, weaken under pressure and eventually break down. This intuition is not just incomplete—it is backward.

Systems do not fail when they become fragile; they become fragile because they have already lost contact with the realities they claim to govern. What appears as stability is not strength, but the final illusion of a structure that can no longer correct itself. This is not a matter of conspiracy or intent, it is structural. 

When institutions become more responsive to their own internal logic than to the world they were created to manage, this dynamic begins to unfold. As James C. Scott observed in Seeing Like a State, modern administrative systems must simplify in order to function. They translate complex, local, and context-dependent realities into legible categories, procedures, and metrics. This makes governance at scale possible—but it also creates systematic blind spots.

At first, the displacement of reality is subtle. Signals are filtered, anomalies are treated as exceptions, friction is absorbed. From within the system, nothing appears fundamentally wrong: Processes continue, reports are generated, decisions are made. This is the phase most observers mistake for stability.

In reality, the system becomes less responsive—not because it lacks information, but because it can no longer recognize what falls outside its categories. It does not consciously ignore reality; it simply ceases to register parts of it. As its categories harden, the system becomes more coherent, outputs are more consistent, procedures are more standardized. Language is more uniform, however, this coherence is achieved by exclusion, not mastery.

Rigidity is not strength, it is the loss of adjustment. At this point, fragility appears to emerge under pressure. However, this is misleading. A system becomes fragile because it must prevent itself from recognizing its own failure. Any signal requiring fundamental revision threatens not just a policy, but the system’s internal logic. The cost of recognition becomes prohibitive.

This is the knowledge problem identified by Friedrich Hayek: knowledge in society is dispersed, tacit, and often inarticulable. No centralized system can fully integrate it. As argued in The Fatal Conceit, attempts to do so inevitably distort or suppress what cannot be processed.

A contemporary illustration is the bureaucratic handling of the covid pandemic in Canada and Quebec. Centralized directives frequently overrode local realities and visible human costs. Once the framework was fixed, admitting significant errors became too costly. Criticism was absorbed through procedure rather than leading to meaningful revision—an instance of administrative rigidity that sustained the appearance of control.

At this point, the problem is no longer ignorance but overreach. Systems do not merely fail to process dispersed knowledge; they restructure reality so that corrective feedback no longer enters. What replaces it is not coordination, but representation. Under these conditions, power does not respond, it absorbs.

Demands are acknowledged but redirected. Critiques are translated into procedural adjustments. Pressure accumulates without producing structural change. It is dispersed, reformulated, or deferred. This creates a second illusion: that pressure leads to correction; it does not.

Pressure can be absorbed indefinitely—so long as it does not align. Fragmented demands rarely threaten a system. Even widespread dissatisfaction can coexist with institutional continuity if it lacks coordination and timing. Saturation is not mobilization.

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The Democrats’ Greatest Fear: The GOP Will Turn James Talarico Into a Creepy, Unmanly Weirdo

According to court records, I have two children. Because I’m so gosh-darn manly, both my children are boys. (‘Cause that’s how genetics works.) Therefore, I’ve never had to give my kids “the talk” — but I have plenty of friends and relatives with adolescent girls, so I know how “the talk” goes:

“Honey, sit down. It’s time you learned the truth. You have to be careful out there, because boys your age are only after… one thing. It’s all they care about!”

Yeah: That one thing is raising children.

It’s one of the strangest, most unexpected evolutions in modern politics. Almost no one saw it coming: Gen Z men and Gen Z women have switched traditional gender roles on the importance of children. 

From NBC News:

The gender gap between men and women has been a durable fact of life in American politics — and nowhere is this gap larger than among the youngest cohort of American adults, Gen Z.

But it’s not just politics driving the divide. The latest NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey shows how the political gender gap persists alongside different social beliefs between young men and women.

[…]

Gen Z men who voted for Trump rate having children as the most important thing in their personal definition of success. Gen Z women who voted for Harris ranked having children as the second-least important thing in their personal definition of success.

The friction between single, childless women and married families is the perfect wedge issue for the GOP to exploit, because it speaks to the aspirational goals of both parties: Republican men define success by being wealthy enough to be a father and support a family.

Yet Democratic women define success by being wealthy enough to no longer need a man or a family.

Those two political visions are incompatible. Candidates who cater to the former risk alienating the latter.

The GOP should force the Dems to split the difference.

If politics is a numbers game, then the numbers favor the GOP: There are roughly 268 million Americans over the age of 15. Just 42.7 million are women who’ve never been married. (Another 14.6 million are divorced women.) 

By contrast, there are over 136 million married Americans. Married couples — plus all the Gen Z men who aspire to be married — are BY FAR the more important demographic.

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German Police ARREST Right-Wing Activist Traveling to “Remigration Summit” at Airport Gate, Issue EXIT BAN

German Federal border police took right-wing “Generation Identity” activist Max Märkl into custody today at Munich Airport to prevent him from traveling to the “Remigration Summit” taking place Saturday in Porto, Portugal, and issued a travel ban to prevent the young man from traveling to Portugal. The Gateway Pundit spoke to Max exclusively.

“They were waiting at the gate for me when the plane started boarding, pulled me out of the line, took my documents and took me into custody at the airport police station, where I was issued a citation banning me from traveling to Portugal until midnight Saturday and threatening to fine me €500 every time I failed to report to my local police station twice daily until then,” Max said.

ing youth movement originally founded in France 2014, which seeks to preserve the cultural identity of Europe. He was scheduled to speak at the Remigration Summit, whose speaker list includes Stefano L. Forte of the New York Young Republicans, US influencer Joey Mannarino, Generation Identity Austria head Martin Sellner, Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, German state parliamentarian Lena Kotré, UK Grooming Gang survivor Sammy Woodhouse and Belgian activist Dries van Langenhove, who was found guilty of “hate speech” this week for drawing a connection between migration and crime, even though the court admits the connection exists.

Last year, eight Generation Identity activists were also prevented from traveling to the 2025 Remigration Summit in Milano, Italy, from Munich airport, but four went via car anyway and were never charged with a crime, presumably meaning prosecutors know the case would never stand up in court.

This time, the Federal police were better prepared, threatening to fine Max if he defies the ban and confiscating his mobile phone right away to prevent him from filming the arrest like last year (as The Gateway Pundit reported).

The Federal Police citation, which Gateway Pundit has read, justifies the travel ban on a free German citizen who has committed no crime by calling the concept of “Remigration” (deportation of illegal migrants) a violation of the German constitution.

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The Big Apple’s Woes Are Not Just the Result of One Election

The destruction of New York is the logic of decades of history and long-forgotten pols addicted to outrageous spending and taxation.

Today’s successors of these big taxers are as myopic as the Bourbon kings who “learned nothing and forgot nothing.”

It didn’t start with the election of socialist/communist Mayor Zorain Mamdani, who followed in their footsteps and said the government should control “the means of production.”

Mamdani is the logical outcome of generations of New York City’s drift toward bigger and bigger government along with destroying the private sector. This leads the most productive citizens and businesses to head for the exits. It’s been going on for generations.

These problems happened as, little by little, the city’s Democrats trended radical left. Even some Republicans moved left. An example of the latter was liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay, elected in 1965 and the author of the city’s first income tax. He later turned Democrat. New York’s popular Republican governor, Nelson “Rocky” Rockefeller—elected four times from the late 1950s to the early 1970s—nearly spent the state into bankruptcy. It was all in the stars. Before winning the statehouse in 1958, a predecessor Republican governor, Thomas Dewey, told a young Rockefeller, “Nelson, I like you but I can’t afford you.” Dewey was prescient.

In some 15 years as governor, he quadrupled the state budget and quintupled the state debt, including substantial authority debt, practices continued by his successors, including governor Andrew Cuomo. “Rocky” raised taxes many times and initiated a state sales tax. These taxes accelerated the departure of industry, with New York state losing some 500,000 manufacturing jobs between 1969 and 1975.

In 1961, two-term New York City mayor Robert Wagner, who successfully sought a third term, faced the same overspending problems as today’s state and city leaders. Like today’s pols, he whined as the bills piled up. Wagner blamed the bankers selling city bonds.

Wagner—in a statement that could have been made by several succeeding mayors—said he was going ahead with this welfare program expansion: “I do not propose to permit our fiscal problem to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city.” About a decade later, the spending bomb he lit blew up. Lindsay’s successor, Abe Beame, campaigned for mayor in 1973 as the man “who knew the buck.”

Yet a 1975 New York Magazine profile described his budgetary practices as “lies and a sham.” William Simon, US Treasury Secretary in his book, A Time for Truth, said New York governor Hugh Carey “ping ponged from position to position,” and demanded a federal bailout.

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Florida Governor Calls For Special Session To Eliminate Property Tax For Homeowners

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 27 called for a special legislative session to pass his plan to exempt homeowners from paying property taxes on their permanent residence.

The Republican governor revealed his plans to sign a proclamation that would require state lawmakers to convene in Tallahassee and discuss his “Save Our Homes” proposal starting on June 1.

“Taxing something that you own repeatedly, which is a property tax, is the worst way to do taxation,” DeSantis said in a news conference on May 27.

DeSantis said he hopes that eliminating taxes from Florida homesteads could be a bipartisan effort.

“You pay all these taxes to acquire that property, and then year after year, you’re just having to write a check just for the privilege of being able to maintain ownership of something that is supposedly yours,” he said.

The proposal contemplates phasing in the exemption and creating a state trust fund to compensate local governments for lost revenue. Because the measure would involve a change to the Florida Constitution, if it passes the state Senate and state House, which are both Republican-controlled, it would need to be approved by voters in November.

Property tax revenue collected by local governments in the Sunshine State has nearly doubled in seven years, to $60 billion from $32 billion, according to the governor’s office.

DeSantis wants to make local governments use property taxes only for core public needs such as public safety, education, infrastructure, and natural resources.

The proposal would require new Florida residents to maintain residency for up to five years before they can receive the homestead exemption.

The proclamation comes as the term-limited Republican nears the end of his term as governor, set for Jan. 5, 2027.

“I want to make sure people can go and vote for something, and then see something that’s going to be very, very meaningful in their lives, and the way to do that is to focus on the homestead property owners,” he said.

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Socialist Candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles Complains After Activists Set Up a Homeless Encampment Outside of HER HOUSE

Nithya Raman is a member of the Los Angeles city council who is running for mayor on the far left. She wants to be the Zohran Mamdani of LA.

That’s not even an exaggeration, by the way. She has the same political philosophy as Mamdani, is supported by all the same types of people, and like Mamdani, she was born outside of the United States but feels completely entitled to run one of our biggest cities.

Recently, some activists set up a homeless encampment outside of her house. They were trying to make a point about her support for occupy-style tent encampments. She had the nerve to be offended by this.

The New York Post reports:

Brutal karma for Nithya Raman as she goes ballistic over staged homeless encampment outside her home

Socialist LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is getting hammered online after appearing visibly rattled by a staged homeless encampment protest outside her own home.

“I’m glad my kids didn’t have to see that,” Raman told comedian Adam Conover on his podcast released Wednesday before adding, “I thought this campaign was going to be about bike lanes and transportation.”

Raman was referring to a staged Memorial Day protest outside Raman’s Silver Lake-area home.

Footage from the stunt shows homeless people climbing out of tents, staging an open-air barbecue and one individual walking around carrying a bucket as neighbors recorded the scene.

The podcast was quickly shared on online with comment exploding because Raman has spent years defending homeless encampments near schools, parks and neighborhoods across Los Angeles while opposing tougher enforcement restrictions.

Critics immediately accused the Democratic Socialist councilmember of showing a stunning lack of self-awareness as families across Los Angeles continue dealing with encampments outside homes, playgrounds and schools.

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Gavin Newsom Vows To ‘Seize’ Money From California Republicans

Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling for California to slap a 100% tax on anyone in the state who collects money from President Donald Trump’s new Anti-Weaponization Fund, framing it as a way to block what Democrats say could become a payday for Trump allies.

“Anyone from California that receives any of those funds,” Newsom said at a Wednesday news conference. “We want to tax 100% of those proceeds and that’s an action the state of California can take. It’s an action we look forward to taking.”

Newsom’s move targets the $1.776 billion fund the Justice Department announced as part of a settlement tied to Trump and the Internal Revenue Service. Supporters say it is open to any claimant who can show the government unfairly targeted them. Critics call it a boondoggle and warn it could be used to compensate people convicted or indicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Newsom leaned into that argument in a post on X, tying the fund to Trump’s sweeping pardons and commutations.

“He pardoned all of those folks that were beating up cops and absolved them, providing them 1.776 billion dollars. So not only do you get a pardon, you get rewarded,” Newsom wrote. “That’s why this is needed.”

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