Category: 9th & Congress

Most date the campus launch of the notorious “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) ideology to 2010, with a hyper-escalation in 2020, although its roots go back to the late 60s when socialists created it on college campuses. Until now, the trajectory has always been up.

However, in the last year, DEI has been exposed to business as a huge profit loser by Dylan Mulvaney, Target and most recently the demise of Sports Illustrated after they started putting men pretending to be women on their covers.

On college campuses, the congressional testimony of the three Ivy League presidents showed DEI for what it is: progressive sanctioned racism that denigrates the autonomy of the individual in favor of collective identities linked to the immutable characteristics of race and gender.

Texas’ anti-DEI law, Senate Bill 17, continues to make national news because it is the strongest legislation of its kind in the nation. Texas parents feel safer sending their children to taxpayer funded campuses because the DEI offices have ostensibly been closed. But almost none of the hundreds of people who ran those offices in colleges and universities across the state have been fired, so we can assume they are still spewing phony DEI nonsense from their new perches as Vice President of Belonging, or some other such Sesame Street name.

Dr. Hal Atkins recently noted in the Wall Street Journal that “DEI is down but not out.” The goal of DEI is to convince white Americans that they are all racist, whether they know it or not, and they want black and brown Americans to believe that they are all victims. It’s a $6 billion industry that is not going to go away quietly.

DEI is purposefully never clearly defined by the left, but new polling shows that Americans know it when they see it — and they don’t like it.

When asked if they would like their company to hire and promote individuals based on race, gender or sexually based categories, 66% of all Americans  said no, including 54% of Democrats, 71% of Independents and 76% of Republicans.

Of course, DEI zealots have a poll too that shows just the opposite. A poll was referenced in the New York Times late last month that insisted a majority (56%) of those surveyed by Pew in February 2023, said that “focusing on increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace is mainly a good thing. Only 16% thought it was mainly a bad thing.”

What the New York Times didn’t report is that the same poll shows that people clearly don’t know what DEI is. Diversity, equity and inclusion sound good, but digging deeper into the data is the point in the same poll. 68% of Americans don’t want hiring or university admissions to be determined by race or gender or any kind of sexual identity group. They want fair and open merit-based selection processes in all things. This is a benchmark principle for a bipartisan majority of Americans.

So what will DEI advocates do now that Claudine Gay has been exposed as a plagiarizing hack (who probably wasn’t qualified to be president of Harvard) and Dylan Mulvaney (who is definitely not qualified to be a woman) is driven back to counting her Twitter (X) followers? How will the DEI industry fight back?

A recent front page of the New York Times makes it clear that even after DEI advocates have been exposed as frauds, their strategy will remain the same – demonize and insist that all opposition to DEI is not substantive, just political. The Times attacks Texas Republican leadership for the DEI law, demonizing rather than addressing whether DEI programs are discriminatory and divisive.

I have frequently noted that I have yet to hear a DEI advocate provide examples proving that DEI has been effective in increasing minority recruitment, either in business or in academic institutions, or improving student performance or outcomes on college campuses. No one is providing evidence of success (and tons of evidence is showing it is harmful), but the pro-DEI crowd ignores that question too.

Americans oppose DEI because it promulgates a race-based ideology that pits students – and all Americans — against each other based on their ancestors. It creates guilt in those who have done no wrong and exonerates others from responsibility for their lives.

But DEI is also something much worse: a war against civilization. Viewing the world through the DEI ideology requires pronouncing virtually everything that humans have accomplished since time began as the result of white supremacy, racism or colonialism.  It rejects the principles of individual freedom and autonomy, science, research, advancement, inquiry and discovery. Their worldview is a dark place where everything humans value is proclaimed to be bad and everything human decency condemns as bad is said to be good.

That’s how thousands of DEI indoctrinated students could continue to flood into the streets to support terrorists who are attempting to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. This barbaric madness and other actions like it will continue until DEI is ended.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.  

Pushing out Claudine Gay as president of Harvard may be the biggest academic rejection in American history since Cotton Mather was passed over for the same job in 1702 because of his participation in the Salem Witch Trials. That said, many people do not realize that Gay is still at Harvard as a professor earning $900,000 annually, even though she has not recanted her anti-Semitic statements or apologized to the people she plagiarized. Instead, she essentially called those who criticized her a bunch of racists.

In Texas, the infamous congressional hearing occurred just as Texas academic institutions were rolling out their plans for compliance with Senate Bill 17, the anti-DEI bill that passed in the 2023 Legislative Session and went into effect on January 1.

UT Regent Kevin Eltife made a heroic statement to usher in the end of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” programs at the University of Texas at Austin:

“We really want to make something crystal clear, whether you like the policy or whether you like this law or any other law, the University of Texas System is going to respect the process, and we’re going to respect the law. We’re not going to look for loopholes. We’re not going to look for workarounds. We’re going to implement the law as passed.”

Texas A&M University posted a website message that states:

“As Texas A&M University prepares to comply with Texas Senate Bill 17 regarding diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities, staff members previously supporting the Office for Diversity have been reassigned, and this office is closed. The university is transitioning S.B. 17-compliant programs and resources previously offered by the Office for Diversity to other areas of the university and discontinuing programs that are not compliant.”

Here’s how the anti-DEI ban is working on Texas campuses so far: The San Antonio Express-News reported that a campus-wide working group sifted through about 300 “DEI programming items” at the University of Texas at San Antonio and decided that only 10% of the items would be stopped. The president of UTSA did say that the school would not repurpose its Office of Inclusive Excellence.

“300 DEI programming items” gives us an idea of the scope of DEI on that campus. And what exactly is “Inclusive Excellence?” Does that mean everybody gets an “A” like they do at Harvard?

Meaningless naming designed to obscure the true ideology is a critical component of the DEI playbook. On Texas campuses, word salad office names and titles are being exchanged for different word salad office names and titles.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement will now become the Division of Campus and Community Engagement.

The Multicultural Center and Pride Alliance at the University of North Texas will now become the Center for Belonging and Engagement. The president of the University of Texas at Dallas admitted that the programs will continue under a different name.

Everyone knew the Pride Center at College Station wasn’t for most A&M students, so now they are going to call it the Student Life Center.

It’s not clear what the former “Pride Center” did at A&M, but at the University of North Texas, some are lamenting that without the Pride Center there will be no place for students to go to get “‘binders’ which women use to smash their breasts so they look like men. According to one staffer, other ‘gender affirming supplies’ are also likely to disappear along with designated spaces for queer students and students of color.”

“Designated spaces for students of color?” Sounds a lot like the back of the bus.

The five employees who worked at the LGBTQA Resource Center and the Center for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Houston will now be working for the Center for Student Advocacy and Community.

Texas Tech University and San Jacinto College simply closed their DEI offices to comply with Senate Bill 17.  On behalf of the conservative majority of Texas, who overwhelmingly oppose the ideology of DEI and who elected the legislators who passed the anti-DEI legislation, we thank you.

We may not quickly know what Texas academic institutions are doing with the hundreds of DEI employees, DEI focused committees and so-called “DEI programming items” that have become embedded within the universities because many have not reported their deployment of DEI personnel and programs. A professor at Texas A&M School of Nursing recently characterized requests for public information from the American Accountability Foundation as “harassment.”

Other campuses are in hysterics over SB 17. UT professors and administrators are telling the Austin American Statesman that the anti-DEI legislation has resulted in profound “confusion and despair” and morale is at an all-time low. Faculty members say they are exhausted.

And, of course, Pavitra Kumar, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, actually went on the record to say that no one is talking to students to ask what they would feel “safe and comfortable with.”

Kumar seems blithely unaware that when college students across the country hit the streets to support the terrorists who attacked Israel on Oct. 7, including at the University of Texas, nobody asked the Jewish students what they’d feel “safe and comfortable with.”

DEI programs at Texas universities employ hundreds of people and cost millions of dollars. The Texas Legislature passed an anti-DEI ban because those programs foment hate and division, and have had no impact in attracting larger numbers of minority and marginalized students or improving their academic outcomes.

Like Claudine Gay at Harvard, most of those who promulgated the divisive DEI ideology on Texas campuses are still there. There is no indication that any Texas academic institution has fired anyone who formally held a DEI title. Like Gay, those who are committed to dividing students into either oppressors or oppressed based on their identity group still have their jobs. They have simply been moved around or given new titles.

The state of Texas put $43 billion into higher education in the last legislative session and Senate Bill 17 has only been in effect for a couple weeks. However, it is clear that it will take a much more comprehensive and serious effort to eradicate DEI from our academic institutions and return to the principles of real academic excellence – merit, vigilance, open inquiry, free speech and respect for people as individuals – not identity groups.

It is not the best of times. Our country is so hopelessly and hatefully divided that we can’t even agree on enough facts to have a decent argument. Millions of people from all over the world are streaming across the border, it seems like half the country is marching in the streets in support of terrorists and the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court is afraid to define what a woman is.

I had been thinking that 2023 would turn out to be worse than 2022, but as it draws to a close, I am feeling optimistic.

Looking back on the year through my newsletter and podcast — 9th & Congress—there are some clear signs that 2023 may prove to be a turning point that even the media can’t ignore. The world of irrational wokeness—critical race theory, gender identity and equity politics is beginning to crumble, and though it is far from over, there is a sense that we are at the beginning of the end.

Last month I wrote that the three Ivy League college presidents shocked America by their robotic failure to condemn the terrorist massacre of Jews on Oct. 7.

It was a stunning made-for-television moment that is serving as a wake-up call to every parent in America who is considering sending a child to college, because virtually all universities and college espouse the same Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) rubbish those college presidents spit out—even in Texas.

I reported that Texas A&M had its own “what could they possibly be thinking” moment when it hired a woke journalism professor to head up a new journalism school who stated, unequivocally, that some sides of a story should not be reported in the news:

“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore. I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate,” said Dr. Kathleen McElroy.  “I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”

Guess who gets to decide which side is “illegitimate?”

At the University of Texas, I spoke with Professor Daniel Bonevac who had testified before the Texas Senate Higher Education Committee that DEI programs function like the “campus thought police” over on the vaunted “40 acres.”

Before Harvard President Claudine Gay embarrassed the oldest university in America in front of the whole country, Harvard had already made big news in 2023 when the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that it had the worst record for free speech of any college in America.  That’s why it was so laughable when Gay tried to pretend that “free speech” was the reason she didn’t condemn the protestors supporting Hamas. Laughably, Harvard had suddenly discovered free speech.

But the problem isn’t just at Harvard. We will learn in a couple days whether the University of Texas really has the No. 3 football team in the nation, but as I wrote last year, when it comes to free speech UT is rated number 236—almost as bad as Harvard, which is at the bottom of the list at 248.  Again, according to FIRE, excluding and shouting down conservative speakers is totally acceptable to the majority of Longhorn students.

I spoke with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, head of “Do No Harm,” which is fighting DEI in medical schools, who told me that some Texas medical schools are no longer looking at GPAs or requiring doctors to take MCAT tests before they are admitted apparently because the tests give an unfair advantage to the people who can pass the tests, regardless of their skin color or gender identity. Texans are not happy to learn this and changes will undoubtedly be made.

The biggest disappointment in 2023 was Texas’ failure to pass school choice, allowing parents to determine what school is best for their child. Just before the final legislative vote in October I wrote about what it has been like to watch this battle for over 20 years in Texas as teachers unions and their allies in the media fight parents and school choice. Though many of the legislators who led the fight against school choice are graduates of private schools and send their kids there, time and time again, they condemned poor and marginalized children to failing schools.

But one of the brightest spots in 2023 is the passage of one of the most important pieces of legislation in our modern history—Senate Bill 17, the anti-DEI bill by Senator Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, which outlaws DEI offices on Texas public university campuses. When a bunch Texas professors threatened to leave the state after SB 17 passed, we all knew they weren’t going anywhere. They haven’t.

Our challenge in 2024 will be to ensure that Texas colleges and universities actually follow the new laws against DEI. So far, not much of what we are seeing is promising. I spoke with Carol Swain, Ph.D., about her latest book, “The Adversity of Diversity,” earlier this month. As a former tenured professor at Princeton who also taught at Vanderbilt, Carol predicted that the DEI bureaucracy will not give up without a fight, which is certainly what we are seeing at Texas universities.

Notably, Carol is one of the people whose work was plagiarized by Harvard’s President Gay. She wrote about it in the WSJ recently noting that the words Gay lifted from her book, “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress” would have been familiar to others at Harvard who likely ignored the fact that Gay copied her work without attribution.

Much of what is wrong in education is linked to DEI, including its tie to Hamas, as we saw after the attacks on Israel and campuses exploded in support of the terrorists. I certainly wasn’t the only one who blamed DEI programs for the protests.

My colleagues Erin Valdez and Chuck DeVore presented a panel discussion on the “Woke Hamas Alliance” showing the depth of this long and dangerous partnership. We were joined on the panel by Rabbi Dan Ain.

It wasn’t long after Oct. 7 before it was easy to see that Hamas was using its own people to fight a media war. Civilian casualties aren’t collateral damage for Hamas, they are a feature of their strategic plan.  Now, almost 12 weeks later, they are obviously meeting with success as we see Biden waffling and many in the West flinching at the body count.

I talked to Rabbi Ain again earlier this month about how his community is coping with the escalating war in Israel. He told me it had been difficult for many Jewish people to imagine that anti-Semitism wouldn’t be broadly condemned in America. As a native New Yorker who chose Texas as a refuge for himself and his family several years ago, Rabbi Ain’s observations on the war and the protests here are extremely insightful.

Of course, DEI is not only about Critical Race Theory and terrorism. It is also about something called “Gender Theory,” a topic you can major in at a couple of Texas universities. The end of the year fundraising appeal from the Texas Tribune, one of the state’s largest media outlets, assures us that it will continue to report on Texas priority issues in 2024 including “transgender rights.”

Last year, I reported exactly what Equality Texas, the leading advocate for so-called LGBTQ+, views some of those rights to be:

• No restrictions on sex change surgery for children, which Equality Texas calls “lifesaving” and a “best [medical] practice.” No restrictions on cross-sex hormones and puberty blocking drugs.
• All health care providers should be forced to provide sex change surgery to children whether the providers believe in them or not.
• Insurance companies should be required to pay for sex change operations for children.
• There should be no restrictions on classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity.
• There should be no restrictions on classroom instruction using nudity and descriptions of sex.
• Men should be allowed to play in women’s sports in Texas colleges and universities.

Equality Texas does not include a “right” to perform drag shows for children in public schools and libraries, although they insisted Texas legislature’s effort to restrict them was “life threatening.”

As a lifelong feminist, it continues to baffle me that there is no bigger outcry against drag shows, which are essentially a woman-focused version of blackface, which is universally condemned. In April I reported that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture describes blackface this way:

“Minstrelsy, comedic performances of “blackness” by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up, cannot be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core. By distorting the features and culture of African Americans—including their looks, language, dance, deportment, and character—white Americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis.”

Change blackness to womanhood and you have a precise definition of drag shows —”comedic performances of women by men in exaggerated costumes and make-up…” As the Smithsonian notes, blackface “cannot be separated from racial derision and stereotyping at its core.” Similarly, drag shows are all about misogyny and utter contempt for women.

Texas passed a law to restrict drag shows in public libraries and in June I wrote that “Texas May Be Winning the War Against Woke.”  As 2023 winds down, it looks like the rest of the country is also having second thoughts about the woke worldview too and not just businesses like Bud Light and Target which learned that it just isn’t worth it to push distorted gender identities. Just this week, big woke tech companies like Google and Meta revealed they are pulling back. Nationally, DEI job postings are down 44%. That’s one more reason to be optimistic about 2024.

Another is that Texans have faced tough times before. In our recent history, it is important to remember that Texas has not always flourished and our state leaders have not always been conservatives. Conservatives did not take control of the Legislature until 2003, just 20 years ago.  That’s why I reached out to several people who were part of the effort to change Texas from blue to red, including nationally known pollster Mike Baselice, media guru David Weeks and communications expert Ray Sullivan to learn how Texas got it right over two decades ago. Their stories say a lot about who Texans are and what they believe.

Then, as now, Texans want small government, individual liberty and freedom and governing principles that allow businesses to prosper and make our state a force in the global market.

They also want to protect our history from the woke forces of DEI.  The state of Texas is finally building a world-class history site at the Alamo after overcoming assaults from the “Forget the Alamo” crowd who want to deny that anything heroic happened there.

I talked with legendary Texan and historic preservationist J.P. Bryan who has been fighting that battle his entire life, making sure that left-wing historians don’t re-write our history to reflect their Marxist world view. Every Texan should be very grateful that J.P. hasn’t backed down from this fight. Next week I will host Judge Ken Wise, President of the Texas State Historical Association, on the podcast. It should be interesting, so listen in.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. Subscribe to her 9th & Congress newsletter to be the first to receive columns like this.

TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with Rabbi Dan Ain, Founder of “Because Jewish,” to discuss how Texas’ Jewish community is coping with the continued strife in Israel.

Listen to the 9th & Congress podcast on Apple or Spotify.

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During the legislative battle last spring to end the racially divisive and cynically named “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs in Texas academic institutions, faculty members called the effort racist and extremist. Hundreds of University of Texas at Austin students and professors flooded into the Capitol building to smirk and boo former HUD Secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, the pre-eminent African American physician, who explained that DEI is a sham. Many stood with their backs toward lawmakers and Dr. Carson—like petulant children—to show their disdain.

Fearful that funding would be cut, administrative leaders from Texas flagship universities insisted to legislators that DEI was simply a program to help students who needed extra support to succeed in college—minority and marginalized students, first generation students, even veterans. Who could be against that?

The truth about DEI—that the world is divided into two groups, oppressors and the oppressed, has been difficult for normal Americans to comprehend. With academic administrators insisting they were simply continuing the work of making college accessible to everyone, donors, parents and students haven’t really pushed back. Texas and Florida are the only states that have banned DEI outright, and major universities like Michigan have doubled down.

All that changed last week when over a billion people viewed video clips of three elite university professors who declined to condemn threats of Jewish genocide on their respective campuses.

People who have been mystified by pro-Palestinian student marches since Oct. 7 that proclaimed America to be an evil oppressor while insisting the Hamas terrorists are the good guys finally have an answer—these awful sentiments are coming from the top.

When the now-notorious college presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Liz Magill from the University of Pennsylvania, told a congressional committee that calls for genocide and intifada by students on their campuses would have to be “considered in context,” their frightening insensitivity shocked some sense into the country.

These DEI “pod people” presidents repeatedly refused to condemn threats of genocide and violence against Jewish students even when given several chances to recant. Their worldview is so distorted that they could not bring themselves to say what is obvious to most Americans—attacking and calling for the deaths of Jews, or any group of people because of their race or ethnicity—is wrong, unequivocally. There is no “context” in which it would be okay.

The blowback was immediate. The presidents were called on to resign and donors threatened to withdraw millions in contributions from their universities. Magill, at the University of Pennsylvania, is already out, although the move is hardly a setback for her. She is still a fully tenured professor in the UPenn law school.

Apologies also came quickly as Gay at Harvard explained that she was focused on the free speech policies at Harvard rather than the recent demonstrations.

Free speech is a good argument to make, but the president of Harvard cannot credibly make it. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Harvard has the worst record on free speech of any university in the country.

At Harvard, the failure of anyone—student or faculty—to call a man who thinks he’s a woman “she” can get you fired. In fact, Devon Buckley, a radical feminist, was disinvited from speaking at Harvard because she has written that “gender is binary.” Even Lawrence Bacow, a former president of Harvard, was drummed off the stage there because students disagreed with his position on disinvestment from Israel.

Every Harvard student must take Title IX training where they learn that expressing any hint of “transphobia,” “fatphobia,” or “cis-heterosexism” is abusive.

Magill and Kornbluth also apologetically said their focus in the Congressional testimony was free speech, but their records are no better than Harvard. The Arab Alumni Association of MIT demanded that Miri Eisin, a former colonel in the Israel Defense Force, not be allowed to speak on campus and she was disinvited. Former CIA Director John Brennen was shouted down at the University of Pennsylvania and his lecture had to be cancelled.

To take a credible stand for free speech, you must stand up for all speech—but these presidents and all universities that are steeped in the ideology of DEI simply don’t allow that.

The Kalven principles, adopted by the University of Chicago, has a different free speech model. It proscribes that every issue is open to debate and universities should be neutral, protecting all sides to speak. University of Chicago students are rallying for Palestine on that campus, but Jewish students are rallying as well. Though there is backlash from both sides, the recently stated position of the University of Chicago on the Middle East is that they have no position—on this or any other issue. Students are free to speak.

If the three presidents had told the congressional committee that their institutions did not take positions on issues, the hearing would have been over, but, again, their record makes it clear that’s not true. While they ignored the attack of Hamas terrorists on Jews on Oct. 7, all three institutions spoke out almost immediately after George Floyd was killed. Harvard not only affirmed its support for Black Lives Matter, it also attacked the Harvard University Police Department. MIT quickly issued a statement promising to increase its diversity and equity efforts, and at the University of Pennsylvania, the official statement issued immediately said that the University community “weeps for the loss of life.”

Their statements called on the community to embrace Black Lives Matter. They also essentially reiterated the DEI principle that we are all either oppressors or oppressed and must continue to fight the racism inherent in everyone, whether they know it or not.

It would be a mistake for universities or any of us to demand that Jewish people be moved from category A (oppressors) in the DEI dichotomy to category B (oppressed). What we should see clearly in the weak and evasive testimony of the three elite university presidents is that the entire ideology of DEI must be overthrown. There is no place for it in academic institutions where all ideas are debated freely and every individual must be judged on his or her merit, achievement and character, not group identity. When that happens—and terrorists launch a genocidal attack on people anywhere—it should be resoundingly condemned, no matter who the victims are.

Oct. 7 should have been an easy call. It is tragic these academic leaders couldn’t make it.

TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with nationally and internationally preeminent pollster Mike Baselice to discuss the electoral trends that turned Texas red and what he predicts for the future.

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Media prophet Marshall McLuhan revolutionized our understanding of communications in the 1970s when he observed that “the medium is the message.” For the terrorists of Hamas, murder and medieval slaughter are clearly the medium. They are also the message.

The Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel was so horrific that it was not immediately apparent that Hamas’ violent actions were chiefly a media operation designed to drive a narrative and impact public opinion.

The mission of Hamas is to kill all the Jews, but they are also propelled by Iran to inflame anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism, not just in the Middle East, but worldwide. On Oct. 7 and in the days since, Hamas has demonstrated they are willing to let thousands—maybe millions—of Palestinians die to achieve that objective.

The deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza aren’t “collateral damage” in this war—they are the strategic feature. The higher the body count, the more effective Hamas can be in pushing the narrative that civilians are the victims of Israeli aggression—even though Hamas started the war.

That’s why Hamas has embedded its military operations in hospitals, schools and mosques. When Israel retaliates against their attacks, Hamas can blame them for killing Palestinian civilians without ever acknowledging that killing Palestinians was part of the Hamas plan.

We don’t know how many civilians have been killed because Hamas releases dubious numbers of casualties—like the 500 people who were supposedly killed by Israel in Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. In fact, many fewer were killed in that hospital from a rocket launched by Hamas.

American mainstream media is key to driving the terrorist narrative, but even CNN has confirmed that Hamas has been storing weapons and staging assaults from hospitals. Independent observers were able to quickly uncover the facts about the Al Ahli hospital, but if the protesters on the streets of America and Europe knew the truth, they ignored it.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib stuck with the hospital lie even as she was censured in the U.S. House. She continues to clamor for a ceasefire, forgetting that a ceasefire was in place until Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

As the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) continues to pull bodies out of the rubble from the first attack, more and more evidence is being found that Hamas and Iran have been planning this assault for months, perhaps years. In addition to digging tunnels in Gaza and taking paragliding lessons in Iran, Hamas laid the real ground work far outside the Middle East.

Academic institutions have been engaged in a war on the West for decades, teaching that virtually everything that has been achieved by mankind—art, science, progressive thought, all advancement—is basically bad, illegitimate, rooted in white privilege and falsely linked to phony standards like merit and achievement. This crowd proclaims that most every facet of life in America is bad.

American elites have bought into this message and once you believe America is bad, it apparently is not all that hard to swallow the lie that terrorism via Hamas is good.

Hamas’ global communications plan is working masterfully. Influential elites in both America and Europe have rallied behind the terrorists.

They marched in the streets of the world’s largest cities even after the release of tapes which show Hamas gleefully killing, raping and mutilating Israelis in the Oct. 7 massacre. They are demanding a ceasefire even after the tape of the phone call of the young Hamas terrorist happily reporting, “Dad, Dad, I killed 10 Jews today!”

They are not even demanding that American hostages be released or acknowledging that a ceasefire would simply allow Hamas to regroup.

Bari Weiss reminds us that this most recent manifestation of the oldest ethnic hatred in the world is not just about the Jews, it is about all of us.

That is why it is so horribly ironic that over the past several weeks, the terrorists have had such an easy time getting Western leaders, particularly on the left, to take their side. In addition to the very sad “Queers for Palestine” crowd, it is almost laughable that Christian churches in America have signed a joint letter calling for a ceasefire. Homosexuality is a capital crime in Palestine and what do you think Hamas would do to American Christians if they aren’t stopped?

The ultimate goal for the terrorist collaboration headquartered in Iran is to obliterate the “great Satan,” which is the Western world in general and the U.S. in particular. Everyone who celebrates America freedom is on their list of infidels. They hate us.

Those who are calling for a cease fire insist they have the moral high ground, as they tell us that the lives of all children matter. They are right about that. That is exactly why Israel is fighting back and America is supporting it—because we believe that the lives of all children matter. All life is precious and the freedom to live those lives is sacred.

It is important to remember that in addition to the more recent pauses, Israel has from the beginning pleaded with Palestinians to get out of harm’s way and, from the beginning, Hamas has threatened to kill its own citizens if they attempt to leave.

Those calling for a ceasefire are missing the key difference in worldviews here. Hamas and their allies are not outraged about the lives of those children—they are just tools in their messaging war. Hamas wants a world where all the Jews are dead and America is brought to its knees. They don’t care how many children die to achieve that goal.

Israel is defending itself and all of us against Hamas’ dark and evil world view. That’s why America is supporting it in its fight to ensure that this does not ever happen again. Pray for them. Also pray that President Joe Biden is not pushed by Hamas’ allies on the left to back away from his support for Israel.

TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with renowned political and public affairs consultant David Weeks to discuss his experience on the Texas Quarter Dollar Coin Advisory Committee, where he contributed to the design and creation of the Texas state quarter that is in circulation today, the current state of Texas’ political climate, and all things in between.

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The Texas AFT has bullishly pledged that it will never surrender in the war against school choice in Texas. That’s no surprise; I have watched teachers’ unions fight school choice all over this country for more than 20 years, often successfully. Lost dreams and opportunities for millions of children are the collateral damage.

Early in my career I worked in the Northeast. In New Jersey, teachers’ unions blocked school choice proposals over the objections of inner-city parents including a statewide coalition of African-American leaders. It was only years later, when now-U.S. Senator Cory Booker became mayor of Newark, that school choice programs were established, pulling that state’s educational system from the brink of ruin.

The New Jersey teachers’ unions didn’t make demands for more funding in public schools, like they have in Texas, because they’d already won the money war. Even 20 years ago, they had some of the highest per-pupil spending and teachers’ salaries in the country. I wrote at the time that the state of New Jersey was spending about the same amount as parents who sent their kids to Harvard but the money didn’t help. In Newark, the graduation rate was 4%.

Texas teachers’ union representatives said during testimony over current school choice proposals this session that no increase in school funding could induce them to support parental rights.

When I first moved to Texas, I was a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, where I watched teachers’ unions and the newspaper demonize Texas Public Policy Foundation founder, Dr. Jim Leininger, for creating a privately funded program that would pay the tuition of any student who wanted to leave the notoriously low-performing Edgewood Independent School District. Dr. Leininger and others invested $50 million for the 10-year program. The school district is still bitter about it, even though results showed increased graduation rates for those inner-city kids who participated in the very popular program.

In addition to private school tuition, Leininger’s program would also have paid for out-of-district tuition for Edgewood students who wanted to attend another public school. Education bureaucrats wouldn’t let that happen. Applicants from the program were rejected.

Think about that scene. A poor child, probably a Hispanic child, from a bad school showed up at a top performing school in San Antonio with funding to pay out-of-district tuition. The child was turned away.

What kind of school official would do that? What teachers’ union or school board member would allow that to happen? How can some of those same people stand up with straight faces today and pretend that their opposition to school choice is based on their concern for children?

I watched the Texas House block school choice for at least four sessions. One 2015 image etched in my memory is a gaggle of Democrat state representatives—many of them African-American and Hispanic, huddled around the front mic of the House smugly attacking school choice, pretending they had the moral high ground.

Many of those elected representatives were private school graduates. Others sent their own children to private schools. However, by standing against school choice, they denied the children of their own constituents, often trapped in the worst schools in the state, any hope of going to a better school. The level of hypocrisy and elitism was staggering.

This is particularly damning when you consider the results of a study published in the Urban Review in 2013 that found that “high achieving black males who attend private high schools are dramatically more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree than similar students attending public schools.”

A majority of Texans support school choice in every poll including nearly 60% of Black Texans, even though most of them also vote Democrat, and killing school choice is part of the Texas Democrat Platform. Texas parents also know that Florida schools went from 33 in the nation to No. 1 by establishing a comprehensive school choice program.

Most parents are like Texas parents. I lived in New York City in the 1990s when public schools were not only dismal, they were dangerous. Nobody I knew, including the lowly underpaid secretaries and custodians in the building where I worked, sent their kids to a public school, because no responsible parent would do that. They worked as many extra jobs as they needed to in order to pay tuition and get their kids in a school where they would have a chance. There is still no real school choice in New York except charter schools and teachers’ unions work tirelessly to close those down.

Parents care about their kids, but there’s very little evidence that education bureaucrats do. Twenty years ago, I interviewed a couple members of the Newark School Board about why they believed the school district should provide them with a car—which it did. One member told me it was absolutely necessary because he had to get to lots of athletic events and with school district plates, he could park without getting a ticket. He didn’t see any relationship between his car and the 4% graduation rate.

I thought the car story was just a New Jersey thing, until I found out that in Texas today, the superintendent of Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, whose base annual salary is $521,000, also gets an additional $24,000 car allowance. No doubt he has a lot of athletic events to attend too—just like nearly every parent who lives in his district and pays his enormous salary with their property taxes.

Even if you believe that pouring more money into our public schools would make the schools better, and we have mountains of evidence that it won’t make any difference, it wouldn’t fix them in time to impact the lives of the kids who are in school today. If your child is in a school where he or she is not thriving, then you want to find a pathway out of that school and into another that works for your child as soon as possible.

That’s why parents across Texas are fighting so hard for school choice. They know that regardless of what Texas decides to do on the issue of school funding, their child cannot wait for another session or a better political climate.

This is their year. Every class in school now is the class of 2023. They only get one shot.

Halloween tourists are making their annual descent on Salem, Massachusetts to visit the real-life site of the supernatural on trial—the 1692 execution of 19 people for witchcraft. Piles of books and movies tell the Salem witch trial story, replete with wild-eyed, sexually repressed Puritan zealots roving the dark, foggy countryside seeking out women to drag into their evil court.

Although it’s no comfort to those who faced the gallows over 300 years ago, in fact, the made-for-Halloween scenes are largely based on centuries-old propaganda repeated by left-wing libertines today, who use it to push the myth that piety is bad and America was, somehow, rotten to the core from the beginning. The truth is the American colonies in 1692 were probably one of the safest places in the world to be if you were a woman—or even a witch.

Records indicate that at least 12,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe during the 17th century, although the estimates go as high as 300,000, during the so-called “Burning Times.” In England, witch executions had slowed down by the mid-1600s, but still, more than 250 women were executed. By contrast, the total body count in the American colonies, including the Salem witch executions, was 35.

Of course, early American colonists believed in witchcraft, just like their European cousins. About 200 people were charged as witches in the American colonies in the 17th century, but almost all of the charges were dismissed.

Equally important, after the witch trials were shut down in Salem in the summer of 1692, no one was ever executed for witchcraft anywhere in America again. Meanwhile, in England, witch trials continued and witchcraft was not decriminalized until 1727. To peg that date to an American benchmark, in 1727, Benjamin Franklin was 21 years old and already writing pamphlets on freedom.

The real history is not easy to uncover, even in Salem, where witch trial tourism is a huge boost to the local economy. (The town slogan is “Stop by for a Spell”).

But what we think we know about the Puritans in general and the Salem witch trials, in particular, comes from some dubious sources, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Salem-born American writer who was a descendant of an early Puritan family. Hawthorne’s great-grandfather had been one of the judges at the Salem witch trials, which was a huge public relations problem for him because of the general shame associated with the trials. To get around it, he changed the spelling of his name. Then, he wrote damning portraits of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts, which helped to distance him from his forebears—and, incidentally, to boost book sales.

This time of year, some secular writers routinely re-tell the witch trials story as one of religious hysteria, blaming the deep faith of the Puritans rather than the virtually universally held superstitions of the times.

Some contemporary Puritan scholars believe that Salem marked an intellectual turning point for the early Americans. Going forward after the trials, the colonists were forced to admit they’d made a horrible error, despite their commitment to creating a new and more moral society.

Historian Paul Johnson noted that in the months following the Salem witch trials, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a motion condemning the Salem judges. The families of those who were hanged were paid compensation and most of the members of the jury signed statements of regret. Many of those who had falsely testified against the victims confessed to perjury.

Samuel Sewall, one of the judges in the witch trials, almost immediately repented his involvement. Churches in Salem convened for days of penance and fasting, a practice that continued annually in Salem churches for years. Richard Francis, Sewall’s biographer, writes that Sewall’s own penance for his involvement in the witch trials was dedicating the rest of his life trying to eradicate slavery in America.

Of course, none of this compensates for the community compliance with the hysteria and mob violence that allowed the Salem witch trials and resulting executions to occur. Still, the American colonies were far ahead of the rest of the Western world at the time in confronting and dismissing superstition.

Their immediate repentance and reparations shows they didn’t hold themselves to a European standard. Instead, the people who had committed to building that “shining city on a hill” when they first landed in the Massachusetts Bay, held themselves to a standard that was higher than anyone in the world had yet seen.

They didn’t realize they were building what would become America, but they did know that their task was to create a place that would come to be called exceptional.