Then came the walk-back in the face of criticism from the dwindling number of her Democratic colleagues who are not anti-Israel. It's Groundhog Day in America.

Don't let that sideshow distract from the Democrats in the White House, whose decision to intrude into a matter of Israeli domestic politics is doing more harm to the U.S.-Israel relationship than the casual bigotry that has become a permanent feature of the American Left.

President Joe Biden and his ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, don't approve of a series of judicial reforms that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports. That sounds to us like something for Israelis to debate among themselves, but Biden has decided to throw spitballs from the sidelines, advising Bibi that Israel "cannot continue down this road"—and then icing him out, announcing in March that he had no plans to invite the prime minister to the White House.

Until Monday, it had been months since they spoke. Biden, at last, has grudgingly extended Bibi an invitation to meet in the United States—but not necessarily at the White House. His invitation to Herzog, who is a critic of the judicial reforms and whose position is purely symbolic, adds insult to injury.

The U.S. president's petulance, meanwhile, has forestalled conversations on important issues. News reports indicate Hezbollah has been crossing into Israeli territory, illegal weapons are proliferating in the West Bank, and the White House is trying to engineer another ill-conceived deal with Iran.

Jayapal's racism is not news, and the decision of a group of Democrats to boycott Herzog's speech makes clear their objection is not to any set of Israeli policies but to the existence of the Jewish state. Biden, on the other hand, has described himself as a "lifelong friend and supporter of the State of Israel." As on so much else, he has surrendered whatever principles he once held to his party's ascendant progressive orthodoxy.

The post On Israel, Biden Surrenders to the Left appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Those are words President Joe Biden's climate czar, John Kerry, would do well to ponder as he prepares to board his fossil-fuel emitting jet to Beijing this weekend to resume in-person climate negotiations with his communist counterpart, Xie Zhenhua. If the trip yields commitments from China to "accelerate its phase-out of coal," Kerry said, it will be a success.

Low bar. China has long pledged to do as much, only to ramp up its coal consumption and carbon emissions. In 2014, one year after CCP head Xi Jinping became president, China unveiled a plan—to much fanfare from the American press—to cap its annual coal consumption at 4.2 billion tons by 2020. China's commitment to lower emissions, former president Barack Obama said at the time, "shows what's possible when we work together on an urgent global challenge." Today, the Chinese have blown past that number and burn more coal than the rest of the world combined.

Kerry has nonetheless argued that, in the case of the Chinese, words alone are proof of climate "progress." He has lauded the genocidal dictator for using the term "climate crisis" and for pledging to cut emissions as part of an "ecological strategy."

"I’d rather have those words than not," Kerry told lawmakers in 2021.

A wise man once said to "trust but verify." A year later, in 2022, Xi approved the equivalent of two new coal power plants per week.

That unfortunately is not the way the Biden administration conducts diplomacy. Kerry in March expressed regret that "other tensions" between China and the United States—you know, spy balloons, concentration camps, and the hacking of America’s commerce secretary—had "gotten mixed up" with climate cooperation.

It is revealing that Kerry and his allies in the Biden administration take the measure of a man by the extent to which he has adopted their own woke rhetoric. We can be sure that Xi understands perfectly who will come out ahead.

The post Climate Czar John Kerry Takes Xi Jinping at His Word. That's the Problem. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The timing of the decision is meaningful, coming days before the July 4th holiday: The Court’s 6-3 ruling vindicates the country’s founding principles and the idea of equal treatment enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

The most important aspect of the ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is the affirmation that the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees to all citizens the equal protection of the law, means that the same law applies in the same way to every person—without regard to race. The Court rejected the so-called antisubordination view, which holds that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids only laws that hurt minorities, not those that help them—that is, that different treatment under the same law is permissible in light of historical inequities.

They made clear that the law guarantees equality of opportunity, not outcome. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, addressed this point powerfully. Advocates of the 14th Amendment, he wrote, "explicitly clarified that the equality sought by the law was not one in which all men shall be ‘six feet high’; rather, it strove to ensure that freedmen enjoy ‘equal rights before the law’ such that ‘each man shall have the right to pursue in his own way life, liberty, and happiness.’"

For decades, we have heard from college administrators that they only employed a little bit of racial discrimination—in cases of two equally qualified applicants, in borderline cases, and so on. If the data unearthed in the litigation wasn’t damning enough, the Ivy League’s collective meltdown over the ruling was itself an embarrassing refutation of those claims. Harvard immediately encouraged applicants to write about their race in their personal essays, while Princeton’s execrable Christopher Eisgruber said the Court had "significantly" narrowed the school’s discretion to admit applicants.

Those responses demonstrate how rampant and pervasive the discrimination in university admissions has been, and how salutary Thursday’s verdict might be. Three cheers.

But now comes the hard part. It is clear from the response of President Biden and the many universities that have already spoken out that they plan to use every means at their disposal to circumvent the law and impose a new regime of racial discrimination relying on proxies for race. A new battle begins today, but the forces of equality have won an important victory over the forces of equity—we can enjoy that for a moment, at least.

The post The Colorblind Constitution Prevails appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Turns out the IRS is quite effective at ferreting out wealthy tax cheats, but sometimes the Department of Justice is not so good at prosecuting them.

According to whistleblower testimony from IRS agent Gary Shapley, the agency uncovered an array of tax crimes committed by Hunter Biden after receiving a tip from the FBI. The younger Biden routinely wrote off almost every part of his hedonistic, depraved, and criminal lifestyle as a business expense, Shapley and a colleague say: hookers (and their travel), a sex club membership, and swanky hotel rooms for his drug dealer and father.

Since 2002, Shapley’s unidentified colleague told Congress, Hunter Biden has brazenly flouted the nation’s tax laws. That’s why the feds recommended a litany of charges including tax evasion, a felony. Shapley called it a "slam dunk case."

But Merrick Garland’s DOJ was able to pick up what the elder Biden was putting down when he insisted his son "has done nothing wrong." Hence the sweetheart plea deal struck Tuesday between Hunter Biden and the DOJ that is a middle finger to the American people.

The attorney general on Friday responded to critics of this deal by gaslighting them: "Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department by claiming that we do not treat cases alike. This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy." He added: "Nothing could be further from the truth."

If Democrats like Garland want their political opponents to take seriously actual attacks on our institutions of government, such as occurred on January 6, 2021, maybe it’s time to cut the crap.

The bottom line is that the IRS appears well-equipped to sniff out missing tax dollars. A Department of Justice that administers the law without fear or favor—now, that’s something that might be worth $80 billion.

The post The IRS Is Alright. It’s the DOJ That Needs Help. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Well, he lied.

The younger Biden owed more than $1 million in taxes over several years, and over $200,000 for the years in which he struck the plea deal. Even then, his celebrity lawyer pal didn't fork over the money to the federal government on his behalf until the Department of Justice started investigating him. He also copped to owning a gun while he was coked up, and lying about it when he bought the firearm in 2018. That’s a felony, but Hunter is getting off with a slap on the wri—uh, probation and enrollment in a "diversion program."

Democrats, very much including Biden, love to talk about the two systems of justice in this country: one for the rich and well-connected, the other for racial minorities and the poor. When it came to his son, apart from lying to the American people, Biden’s statements about Hunter Biden’s innocence constituted presidential interference with the Justice Department probe.

So we’ll wait for the left to cry foul over this and the fact that the presidential son got off with a slap on the wrist for crimes that would have landed others behind bars.

The rank bullshit that has emanated from the White House on related issues is secondary but not unimportant. It wasn’t even a year ago that Biden signed the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act into law. In the weeks beforehand, we heard endless jawboning from administration officials about why the additional $80 billion the law is now funneling to the IRS, much of it for increased enforcement, was necessary to hold the powerful to account.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for one, pointed to "typically very high-net worth, high-income individuals and businesses that have opaque sources of income that are not paying the taxes that are due."

The message sent by the Biden administration on Tuesday was clear: enforcement and prison for thee–but not in a million years for our president’s drug-addled, tax cheat son.

The post A Tale of Two Systems appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Quoting a "queer" University of Florida student, Eisgruber, in a commencement address that would have fit right in at a Democratic political rally, warned that it is becoming harder for students and professors to speak their minds about controversial issues. Not because of the campus censors on the left, of course, but due to red state laws that prohibit either "discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity" or "teaching disfavored views about race, racism, and American history." In other Republican-controlled hellholes, he said, lawmakers seek to "abolish tenure, thereby enabling politicians to control what professors can teach or publish."

Eisgruber and Princeton, of course, made headlines last May when the school dismissed a star classics professor, Joshua Katz, who had been a vocal critic of the school’s racial politics. The reason given for the ouster—Katz’s consensual affair with a former student decades earlier—was widely seen as pretextual, and pundits accused Princeton of retaliating against a tenured faculty member for political speech.

Eisgruber had publicly condemned an essay Katz wrote in 2020 attacking the university’s campus activists. And Princeton had included the professor on a list of racists—presented to freshmen at a mandatory orientation session—who’d allegedly harmed the school’s good name.

That history was one of many ironies in a tone-deaf speech. Set aside Eisgruber’s facile distortion of laws like Florida’s, which bar public school instruction on gender identity. It takes a special kind of blindness, hypocrisy, and sheer partisan animus to conclude in this day and age that Republicans are the biggest threat to free expression on college campuses.

A recent survey of Princeton seniors found that just 3 percent of "leftist" students are afraid to share their views, compared with 64 percent of those who identify as "very" conservative. At Ohio State, 45 percent of conservative students say they self-censor "several times a month" while just 16 percent of liberals say the same.

You wouldn’t know it from Eisgruber’s speech. It is "wrong," he told Princeton’s 276th class, to frame "diversity and inclusivity" as threats to academic freedom. When you hear the enlightened tell you there are no trade offs or tough choices to be made, run.

In fact, Princeton’s own free speech policies make nearly the opposite point: "Concerns about civility and mutual respect," they say, "can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable." It’s an admirable ideal that perished long ago in Princeton. Eisgruber’s address was an embarrassing epitaph. RIP.

The post Political Pablum at Princeton appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

A legal defense fund set up on his behalf has already raised more than $2.7 million. That should afford Penny the best defense money can buy. So what talented lawyers have been enlisted to argue his case? The New York City-based law firm designated as the beneficiary of that money, and which seems to have a particular background in DUI defense, isn't saying.

Read the fine print on the fundraising site GiveSendGo, and you'll see that Penny hasn't actually established a legal defense fund. Instead, all donations to Penny are to be "sent to and managed by the law offices of Raiser & Kenniff, P.C." Any funds raised beyond what is needed to cover Penny's legal defense "will be donated to a mental health advocacy program in New York City."

We asked Raiser & Kenniff, which doesn't appear to have much experience defending manslaughter charges, whether the firm plans to bring on outside counsel to assist in a trial that is certain to attract national media attention. We haven't heard back. Nor have we gotten a response to our inquiry about what charity will receive the excess funds.

Penny's case, and his cause, are important to New York City and to the country at large. We fear this Good Samaritan, unfairly targeted by a corrupt and distorted New York City justice system, may now see his defense torpedoed by avaricious lawyers with little or no experience defending clients against such serious charges and under the glare of such overwhelming media attention. But unlike Penny, those lawyers will get no benefit of the doubt from us. The citizens opening their pocketbooks to fund Penny's defense deserve answers.

The post The Questions Daniel Penny's Lawyers Won't Answer appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Sounds like a humanitarian tragedy, a policy disaster, a political nightmare. But not if you hear the Biden administration tell it! Speaking at a swanky fundraiser in Atlanta on Friday as this scene was playing out, Vice President Kamala Harris—President Joe Biden named her border czar, remember?—declared that things down south are "going rather smoothly."

We'd hate to hear what "bumpy" looks like. President Biden, meanwhile—he's on vacation in Rehoboth Beach—said that things at the border are going "much better than you all expected." Low bar.

Elections have consequences, and the situation on the southern border is a direct result of policies Biden and Harris put in place on their first day in office. Border wall construction came to a halt, and among other things the Biden administration put an end to the "Remain in Mexico" policy that required asylum seekers to wait in a third country until their claims were adjudicated.

Our colleague Joe Simonson was in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, last week, and he saw the situation firsthand. Some holding facilities reached more than 200 percent capacity over the weekend. Conditions in at least one of those facilities was so poor that a 17-year-old child from Honduras died, and the Biden administration has cut most of the migrants loose. It's the administration's only answer.

Even Democrats are starting to notice. New York City mayor Eric Adams—who once said that "New York City is, and has always been, a city of immigrants" and pledged that his government would "reflect that"—now says there is "no room" in his city for migrants.

Adams is converting public school gyms and shuttered prisons into shelters for aliens arriving by the hundreds. "No city should be going through this," Adams said.

No country should, either.

The post The Biden Administration's Newspeak on the Border appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"Jordan Neely was murdered," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on Twitter. Neely was a schizophrenic with a long history of menacing subway riders, and that's what he was doing when a 24-year-old Marine, Daniel Penny, intervened to stop him in a confrontation that resulted in Neely's death. AOC calls it a "public execution."

New York City councilwoman Tiffany Cabán announced that "people experiencing homelessness, mental illness, hunger, and frustration need and deserve compassion and trauma-informed care" rather than "force."

Set aside the fact that these avatars of progressivism have had precious little to say about the 27 others killed in New York City's subways over the past three years, as the Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas points out.

More importantly, Neely's death is a direct result of the Left's approach to mental illness and criminal justice. The Left's embrace, over the past five decades, of deinstitutionalization, and its opposition to compulsory treatment for mental illness, have led to the creation of a permanent mentally ill homeless population.

And, since Floyd's death in May of 2020, progressives in state legislatures, working hand in hand with left-wing district attorneys like Manhattan's Alvin Bragg, have done away with cash bail for all but the most violent crimes, ordered prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for loads of criminals, and made a litany of offenses, such as armed robbery and drug dealing, ineligible for prison sentences.

In a functioning city with a functioning subway system, Neely, who had had dozens of brushes with law enforcement and a warrant out for his arrest for the assault of a 67-year-old woman, would not have been on that train striking fear into his fellow citizens.

In the last two years alone, Neely had punched two people outside of subway stations. Until the Left restores order to our cities, citizens like Penny will feel compelled to step into the breach. Surely the caterwauling from AOC is intended to deter decent citizens from intervening where the police no longer can and the government no longer will. The thin blue line once stood between civilization and anarchy. Now it's Daniel Penny and men like him.

It's unlikely Penny can be convicted, but Bragg and company may yet try and make an example out of him.

Neely and Penny are both victims here. The perpetrators are ensconced on the New York City Council, in Albany's State Legislature, and in the offices of George Soros's Open Society Foundations.

The post In NYC Subway, Leftist Governance Reaps What It Sows appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The policies of his administration have led to an unprecedented spike in border crossings and, well, the chickens are coming home to roost. A New York Times report on Monday detailed how those policies are fueling a nationwide child labor crisis, the details of which would make Upton Sinclair blush. Some might even call it "cruel" and "inhumane."

Thousands of alien children—some as young as 12 years old—are now working illegally at slaughterhouses, factories, and construction sites. Caseworkers estimate that roughly two-thirds of all unaccompanied alien children will work full-time after they're released from government custody, and the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with over 85,000 alien children since Biden assumed office.

None of this comes as a surprise to the White House, whose response to the crisis has been a master class in buck-passing and evasion.

In the summer of 2021, senior Biden administration officials were warned that migrant children were being put in dangerous and compromising situations. The administration went on to halt most worksite immigration enforcement raids, arguing it would protect "the dignity of the individual" and free up resources to focus on "unscrupulous employers." How's that working out?

The position of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for placing  migrant children with guardians, is that the agency is not responsible for "protecting unaccompanied alien children from abuse and trafficking after placement with a sponsor." Well, OK then. And the Biden administration official in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement testified to the House on Tuesday that alien children in danger can call an 800 number for assistance.

We won't hold our breath for the sort of frenzied, wall-to-wall media coverage this story deserves, which might prompt the administration to reverse course. That was reserved for former president Donald Trump's policy of separating parents from their children to disincentivize the smuggling of minors over the border. Biden called that policy "a moral failing and a national shame." It is a more fitting description of the disaster his own actions have wrought.

The post Joe Biden's Immigration Policy Comes Home To Roost appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

It would be bad enough if the U.S. government couldn’t protect some of its most sensitive assessments of Russia’s military, Egypt’s diplomacy, and South Korean politics from public disclosure.

But it is particularly troubling that the same government that can’t keep American state secrets off of social media is devoting itself to far less pressing endeavors.

Just this week we learned that the FBI, responsible for enforcing the laws against the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, is monitoring the threat of "Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism." They’ve even created a word cloud! The FBI associates incels with the use online of run-of-the-mill conservative terms like "red-pilled" and "based." And we know thanks to Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter files how closely the FBI worked with the country’s largest social media companies to keep so-called disinformation offline.

Do we really need FBI agents monitoring online edge-lords when someone is picking the Pentagon’s pockets like this? We wish we could say that the only thing needed is a shift in focus.

Unfortunately, the bureau’s recent investigative priorities reflect a broader trend of law enforcement being weaponized against some citizens, while favored classes are treated with kid gloves. How else does one explain why the home of a first time offending pro-life activist (who was later acquitted) was raided by armed G-men before dawn in September. And yet there have been no flashy raids of suspects behind the wave of attacks on pregnancy crisis centers since last year’s Dobbs decision.

There are many reasons for this, but a big one is that we aren’t exactly sending our best and brightest to the FBI. Just look at the parade of partisans, from former officials like Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe, who have recently been drummed out and who are demonstrating in their new roles as cable news analysts that we trusted our national security to power hungry zealots who are also not very smart.

This latest leak should be a wake-up call to go back to the basics. That includes hiring the best and brightest people passionate about safeguarding the country’s most sensitive material and hunting down those who expose it unlawfully.

The post The FBI Should Go Back to the Basics appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

As conservatives, centrists, and sensible people of all stripes have been shouted down and harassed on college campuses, administrators have poked their heads up again and again to deliver this line, promising us that there are no tradeoffs that must be made, no difficult balance that must be struck, only false choices that must be rejected.

So there, of course, was Stanford Law School's associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that "Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford."

"Free speech, academic freedom, and work to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion must coexist in a diverse, democratic society," Steinbach wrote.

The op-ed comes weeks after she made headlines for joining student protesters in Palo Alto who shouted down the conservative Fifth Circuit judge Kyle Duncan and told him, "We hope your daughters get raped!" (Or, as Steinbach puts it, they "peppered him with questions and comments.")

That's when Steinbach—now on leave as a result of her bizarre conduct—intervened to deliver prepared remarks in which she at last found a hard choice worth careful consideration, asking Duncan to weigh the emotional harm he might cause students against the value of delivering his remarks. So that's what she means by free speech!

Steinbach's remarks are reminiscent of Yale University's response to the 2015 campus meltdown over Halloween costumes. University president Peter Salovey, determined to please everybody all of the time, browbeat us about the "false dichotomy" between inclusion and free speech. "I believe we can uphold free expression and make our campuses more inclusive places," he wrote.

The foundational documents about free speech on university campuses, the University of Chicago's Kalven Report (1967) and Yale's Woodward Report (1974), made precisely the opposite point: Free inquiry and free expression are the highest goals of the university, and their pursuit will inevitably cause "shock, hurt, and anger," as the Woodward Report stated.  The Kalven Report concluded: "In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting."

Steinbach, Salovey, and the rest of their lot have opted to create safe spaces. Don't be fooled: The tradeoff is free speech.

The post DEI's Ignoble Lie appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Now we debate the propriety of the conservative students on the receiving end of that vitriol expressing their displeasure with the school, and their classmates, in the press.

Stanford administrators are hoping this public relations nightmare will blow over if everybody, particularly the Federalist Society students targeted by the activists, would be so kind as to shut up and take this one on the chin.

The administration aims to run the operation like any abusive parent would: Don't say a word to anybody about how you got that bruise, or else!

Perhaps most outrageous is an email sent Tuesday from Federalist Society faculty adviser Michael McConnell—the lone conservative on the Stanford Law School faculty—to the student group's members urging them, in their interactions with the press, "not to speak out of anger and not to exacerbate the already tense situation."

"Many in the media would like nothing better than to find sources and quotes that are inflammatory on one side or the other. This is not in your interest, and it is not in the long-term interest of the chapter at Stanford—nor of Stanford as an institution," McConnell wrote. "In particular, I have heard that some outlets wish to obtain names and likenesses of protesting students. I suggest not cooperating with any such efforts." With friends like these!

Why members of the school's Federalist Society chapter should help cover up the misconduct of their peers and the administrators who collaborated with them is a mystery to us. But such a cover-up is surely not in the best interests of the institution or the legal system it ostensibly serves.

McConnell told us he stands by his guidance about press engagement, but did not respond to questions about what sorts of consequences might be appropriate for the mob that shut down the event.

The school's chapter of the National Lawyers Guild—the organizing force behind the Maoist horde of would-be lawyers—papered the hallways prior to Judge Duncan's arrival with the names and photographs of the Federalist Society's board members.

Yet when Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium quoted the group's board members describing the protests as "Stanford Law School at its best," and named those board members, we got a note from one of them, Lily Bou, demanding that we remove her name and those of her classmates. "You do not have our permission to reference or quote any portion of this email in a future piece."

That's not exactly how the First Amendment works.

We've gotten similar complaints about publishing images—pulled from social media—of Stanford Law School dean Jenny Martinez's classroom, which protesters covered end to end in flyers after she issued an apology to Judge Duncan.

We received the following note from Mary Cate Hickman, who identified herself as a second-year law student and describes herself on LinkedIn as "passionate about social justice" and a graduate of the Sorbonne.

Hickman demanded that we "anonymize the face of the student in the red hoodie" because "California is a two-party consent state, and you have no right to publish this student's identity/likeness/face without consent."

California is a two-party consent state for the recording of oral communications, not photographs, and even that only pertains to situations in which there is a presumption of privacy—that is, not a law school classroom in which student activists are snapping photographs and posting them to Instagram. Hickman did not respond to a request for comment.

What's eminently clear from the drama unfolding in Palo Alto is that while Stanford law students may be the vanguard of an anti-constitutional revolution, they don't know much about the law. Where Stanford has failed to educate them in the limits of privacy and the rights of a free press, we will endeavor to fill the void with our continuing coverage of this ugly affair.

The post At Stanford, Public Accountability for Thee But Not for Me appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Many of those depositors were tech start-ups, and until Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s announcement on Sunday afternoon, they didn’t know if they would make payroll on the 15th of the month. Their investors, famous for their risk-taking, feared massive losses in their portfolios.

The bank’s clients were in a bind because federal insurance only covers deposits up to $250,000. That’s more money than almost anybody would keep in a bank account—but not a start-up! According to the Economist, almost 93 percent of SVB’s deposits were not insured.

These entrepreneurs either knew, or should have known, the risks they were taking, and the government should not be in the business of rewarding this arrogance and stupidity. A government bailout is nothing more than a backdoor that will leave taxpayers on the hook for the foolish decisions of so-called capitalists who are unwilling to pay the costs of risks gone awry.

The Fed claims none of the costs of this bailout will be borne by the taxpayer. Don’t be fooled by these word games. SVB’s safety net may be paid with insurance premiums that banks pay to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That in turn means that banks will charge their customers—the taxpayers—more.

Meanwhile, the tech industry has already benefited tremendously from government policy. From 2020 through the end of 2021, SVB’s assets grew 83 percent—and kept growing into 2022. For at least three years, government policy has underwritten tech speculation and fantastic valuations. Venture capitalists and founders became fantastically rich.

In fact, they became so flush that they poured cash into their portfolio companies until it overflowed into deposit accounts at SVB, which in turn bought government bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

When interest rates rose thanks to Bidenflation, those bonds and securities lost value. A government bailout, given this chain of events, is nothing more than socialism for the rich.

It is not irrelevant that upwards of 90 percent of Silicon Valley’s political donations flow to Democrats, and that the tech bros shelled out far more for President Joe Biden than for Hillary Clinton. This of course as some of Silicon Valley’s major players have cozied up to America’s enemies and eagerly done the bidding of the Democratic Party in its attempts to ostracize and silence dissenting views.

It’s hard to stomach a bailout for these people. It will be even harder for the Democrats to explain it to American taxpayers.

The post Silicon Valley Bank Bailout is Socialism for the Rich appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Delaney built a legal practice defending institutions embroiled in sexual misconduct scandals. He represented the elite St. Paul's School in a 2016 civil lawsuit alleging the school fostered a culture of sexual harassment that led to the statutory rape of then-15-year-old Chessy Prout. In the course of the proceedings, Delaney opposed the Prout family's request to preserve their daughter's anonymity.

Now, with Prout and her parents begging Democrats to withdraw Delaney's nomination, Delaney is an awkward nominee for a party that claims to champion the interests of women and victims.

Most Democrats are keeping their mouths shut—9 of the 11 Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee didn't even show up for Delaney's hearing last month before the committee. But New Hampshire Democratic senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen have lauded his "meaningful service to our communities" and "commitment to justice." Proving that politicians really will say anything, seven years ago Shaheen was praising Prout as a "remarkable, brave young woman" and thanking her for speaking out.

But we're pleased some Democrats may be coming around to our long-held view that lawyers for the scum of the earth should be held accountable for the scummy clients they choose to represent. That seemed to be the thrust of the lengthy list of written questions Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) had for Delaney. She wanted to know just how many educational institutions and youth organizations he has represented in "instances of misconduct experienced by students." (The answer: 33.) She had questions about his tactics, too.

Not two decades ago, Democrats like Feinstein were aghast when conservatives argued that lawyers like Neal Katyal, who had volunteered his services to al Qaeda detainees, were unfit to serve in the Justice Department. Overnight, every Democrat in the land was dusting off the history books to remind the unwashed masses about John Adams and the Boston Massacre and the nobility of providing legal representation to America's enemies.

Our adversarial system of justice may guarantee the accused a vigorous defense, but it does not guarantee the attorneys who represent terrorists, perverts, or the wealthy institutions that harbor them the opportunity to parlay their work into plum government posts. Delaney is no exception, and we look forward to the Biden administration's withdrawal of his nomination.

The post Defend Creeps for a Living? Dems Have Second Thoughts About Making You a Federal Judge  appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The root of the controversy is the English department's decision to host, for its Edward Said Memorial Lecture, the anti-Semite Mohammed El-Kurd. No, there is no reason you would know him. As "Palestine correspondent" for The Nation, he has distinguished himself chiefly for his slanders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, including the claim that Israelis "harvest organs" of martyred Palestinians to "feed their warriors."

On stage at Princeton—after university professor Zahid Chaudhary heralded him as a "truth teller," according to audio of the remarks reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon—El-Kurd told the crowd that Palestinians have no choice but to resort to violence against Israelis. "What else would you do if there is an occupying power in your backyard beating the shit out of your family? Of course you're gonna throw stones," he said to raucous applause. "I can just see that as a headline: 'Of course you're gonna throw stones.'"

El-Kurd is allowed to be a bigot and a moron, and Princeton to celebrate and honor his work.

But his presence on campus, and his reception by some of the school's professors and administrators, are hard to square with their devotion to "antiracism." In a statement signed by acting department chairman Jeff Dolven, the English department has pledged "to investigate racist beliefs and practices with rigor and compassion." Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber sounded a similar note when he told Princetonians, in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020, "We all have a responsibility to stand up against racism, wherever and whenever we encounter it."

Pressed on the decision to welcome El-Kurd, Dolven now takes a more catholic approach: The English department has "always granted great autonomy to faculty in making invitations," he said, adding, "This openness also means that the department as a whole does not issue statements. It is an important principle for us that neither I nor anyone else among us attempts to speak for a diverse collective."

Well, riddle us that.

In an email exchange with Princeton senior Adam Hoffman, Dolven would not condemn violence against Israelis and declined to share his views on the terror group Hamas. He referred our request for his comment on this catalog of El-Kurd's anti-Semitic slanders to a Princeton spokesman, who declined to comment on his behalf. Eisgruber, too, declined to comment.

The powers that be at Princeton may be choosing to keep their mouths shut, but their message is clear. Some forms of racism are to be confronted and denounced. Others are to be met with silence and mealy-mouthed commitments to free expression. And your anti-Semitism, however vile, egregious, and strident, won't just be invited on campus—in many corners, it will be celebrated.

The post Princeton Fetes an Anti-Semite appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

With Biden safely ensconced in the White House—and with the facts about the laptop plainly obvious—the Washington Post has swooped in to tsk-tsk Politico for over-dramatizing its October 2020 headline: "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say." 

Now that we all know the laptop is authentic, the Post wants us to distinguish between "disinformation" and "information" campaigns—foreign efforts to interfere with our elections through the dissemination of accurate information. Scary!

But anyway, the former intelligence officials' letter, the Post’s Glenn Kessler writes, "does not even say what the Politico headline claimed—though that headline likely shaped perceptions of the letter that continue to this day." Except, the headline did appropriately characterize what the intelligence officials said, sans the cover-your-ass caveats those officials well knew would be ignored by a partisan and irresponsible press. That was precisely their intent. 

It was the lack of any journalistic skepticism about those claims, and the motivations the parties might have had for making them, that was the mistake. The Post reveals that the letter was the brainchild of former deputy CIA director and ubiquitous television presence Michael J. Morell, "a top candidate for CIA director in a Biden administration." Forgive us for thinking that a seasoned Washington operator like Morell might have had some idea how the letter would be received in the press and consider it just the sort of thing that would nudge his application for CIA director to the top of the pile. 

That brings us to the rest of the letter’s signatories, who have decided now’s the time to point out subtleties in their letter that two-and-a-half years of hysterical press coverage overlooked. The former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told the Post that Politico was guilty of "message distortion."

"All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation," he added. "Politico deliberately distorted what we said." Now he tells us! 

The figures most guilty of distortion in this sorry ordeal are Morell, Clapper, and their colleagues, and their attempts to distort, retroactively, their October 2020 efforts add insult to injury. 

The mainstream media, for its part, have been revealed as their witting pawns, starting with the Politico piece and ending with the laughable Washington Post fact check that lays the blame primarily at Politico’s feet—rather than calling these Democratic operati, er, intelligence officials—to account for their own attempts to influence a U.S. election.

The post Intel Officials’ Fresh Laptop Baloney appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

She received her Ph.D. in toxicology from Johns Hopkins University. She taught at Harvard's School of Public Health. She served as a cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute. And she's now affiliated with both the American College of Epidemiology and the Academy of Toxicological Sciences. She believes in "the science." 

There’s just one problem. Goodman doesn't think the federal government should come into your home and rip out your gas stove. In her (expert) opinion, studies linking the suddenly controversial appliance to childhood asthma are flawed. They don’t justify dramatic action. 

Goodman’s evidence-based conclusions made her, understandably, an attractive resource to the gas industry’s lobbying arm, which has paid her to testify on its behalf. It’s a tale as old as time, but news to the New York Times, which published a hit piece on Sunday arguing that Goodman is little more than a gas industry shill posing as an "independent scientist."

The Times has of course demonstrated less interest in ferreting out the conflicts of interest behind the groups producing the studies suggesting gas stoves are to blame for a host of maladies. 

Take the Rocky Mountain Institute, the green energy group behind the now-infamous report attributing 13 percent of U.S. childhood asthma cases to gas-stove use. That study, the Times says in the same Sunday piece, is the "solid" work of unbiased "experts."

Our colleagues Collin Anderson and Joseph Simonson have reported on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s agenda. It boasts of its attempt to drive an "economy-wide transformation" away from oil and gas in the name of the "climate crisis" and is led by green energy executives who stand to profit from such a transformation. 

That is information you won’t glean from a paper whose primary business—aside from recipes, Wordle, and negotiating pay raises with its union—is mediocre political axe-grinding. 

The post The New York Times Finally Finds a Scientist It Doesn't Like appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

We have closely followed the cases of Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis, the New York City attorneys who tossed a Molotov cocktail into a police cruiser in May of 2020. Or, as the New York Times put it, their legal careers were sidetracked when "a Molotov cocktail ignited the center console of an empty police car during a Black Lives Matter protest." Rotten luck! 

Rahman went to Fordham. Mattis went to Princeton and NYU. They are precisely the sort of well-resourced and well-connected people that the New York Times is always telling us the criminal justice system favors—unjustifiably. 

The Trump administration reached a plea deal with the defendants that discarded six of the seven counts against them, but argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would have made them eligible for steeper prison sentences. Then the Biden Justice Department rolled out the red carpet, allowing Rahman and Mattis to cop to a lesser charge and pressing the court for a light sentence. 

Enter the New York Times, on the eve of Mattis’s sentencing, for a window into how the mainstream media’s blinkered view of the world skews news coverage. The paper omitted the details of Team Biden’s lenient approach but swooped in to inform readers that Rahman and Mattis are "both first-time offenders" who "had been high achievers." Rahman was "the primary caretaker of her aging mother," Mattis of three foster children. 

Funny, we never got those sorts of loving details about the hundreds of January 6 defendants, like Thomas Webster, the former New York Police Department officer and retired Marine convicted of assault, or Dustin Thompson, the Ohio exterminator who stole a bottle of bourbon and a coat rack from the Capitol. Whether they were first-time offenders, high achievers, caretakers for aging parents, or guardians of foster children, we’ll never know. 

Painting a vivid and sympathetic portrait of one class of domestic terrorists and demonizing the others, well, that is precisely the point. 

The post An Idiot’s Guide to Glowing Coverage in the New York Times appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Biden promises that funneling hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars to green energy projects will create an economy full of "well paying, union jobs" that will revitalize America's manufacturing sector and allow U.S. businesses to "compete and win globally."

It might be a compelling pitch—if only it were true. Instead, the president’s pursuit of an environmental agenda driven by left-wing fringe groups throws American workers under a Chinese electric bus.

Truth be told, China dominates the green energy supply chain. From slave labor-produced solar panels in Xinjiang to lithium battery plants in Sichuan, the road to renewables runs through the Red Dragon. Our colleague Collin Anderson reported this week on a $50 million Biden administration grant to a lithium battery company, ostensibly to 'ensure our clean energy future is American made." What do you know, it sources its materials in China.

It’s a tale as old as time. Want to buy a union-built, American electric vehicle, as Biden has encouraged? Good luck finding one that's made with domestic components. How about solar panels for your home? If the raw materials don't come from Uyghur concentration camps, they'll be tough to find. "China's grip on clean energy," the Washington Free Beacon reported in February 2021, "means that Biden's push for a green energy economy will likely benefit the communist nation."

Fast forward two years and that prediction is playing out in real time: The Biden Energy Department sent $200 million in October to an electric battery company that operates primarily in China. The same company sits on a federal watchlist of foreign entities that fail to comply with U.S. auditing requirements.

The only way Biden can rescue his green economy from China’s clutches is to supercharge the domestic production of raw materials needed for renewables and other industries, something that would infuriate the environmentalist left that is demanding a green future. That’s one of the few promises he made on the campaign trail he would do well to make good on.

The post How Biden’s Green Agenda Runs Through Beijing  appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.