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Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin bristles as Republicans hit woke military
By Caitlin Doornbos
WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin became visibly frustrated Tuesday as Republicans on the Senate Armed Services committee criticized him for leftist Pentagon policies and programs, including a 2021 stand down to address extremism in the ranks.
“As one of your first acts, Mr. Secretary, you put our military – every single member, active duty and Reserve – to a mandatory training to root out extremists,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said during a hearing on the Defense Department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2024. “That sent a message … that our military is filled with extremists.”
“Our military is one of the most diverse organizations in the world,” Tuberville added. “It is full of patriots.”
Defending the stand down, Austin said, “we’ve always had regulations against extremist behavior.”
“You’ve heard me say that 99.9% of our troops are focused on the right things each and every day,” he said. “But in this case, a small set of actions can have outsized impact.”
The hearing grew tense when Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) accused Austin of wasting more than five million military man hours on the training.
“Mr. Secretary, you put our military – every single member, active duty and Reserve – to a mandatory training to root out extremists,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville.Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
“You mentioned earlier that you didn’t want to spend a lot of time and you thought that it was a drag on our force [by] spending money on things that don’t make us a fighting force,” he said. “… [But] the stand down day to address extremism cost the military and taxpayers nearly 5.4 million man hours.”
Austin took issue with the claim, demanding that Schmitt say “where that number came from.”
The lawmaker replied that the calculation was based “on the number of folks [who] didn’t work that day.”
“That’s not accurate, Senator,” Austin responded, claiming that the number of hours lost added up to 4.2 million rather than 5.4 million.
“It’s as simple as this: When asked to provide that number, [the Pentagon’s] approach was – there are 2.1 million troops, each troop spent two hours,” the secretary said. “That’s where the number comes from.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. MilleyChairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley claimed that the millions of man hours were “out of 2.8 billion man hours available on a 10-hour workday…”ZUMAPRESS.co
Undeterred, Schmitt said that whether it was 5.4 or 4.2 million hours, the military “can’t get that time back.”
“Whether we’re talking about dollars or hours, millions still matter,” the congressman said. “The folks that I represent think a million is a big number.”
Testifying alongside Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley claimed that the millions of man hours were “out of 2.8 billion man hours available on a 10-hour workday, five days a week for the US military.”
While two years have passed from the stand down, the reference to it during a hearing meant to address the DoD budget came as Congressional Republicans ramp up their scrutiny of “wokeism” in federal policies.
Also Tuesday, the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a hearing dedicated to “examining progressivism’s impact on an all-volunteer military.”
“We all know the primary mission of the armed forces is to protect and defend the nation and our interests abroad,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.). “The military is not the institution for social experiments and political correctness.”
“The administration seems to be willfully blinded by how its progressive ideals are affecting military readiness,” he added.
The anti-woke movement got its latest win on Friday when House Republicans passed the Parents Bill of Rights to require public schools to disclose all curricula, reading lists, library books and budget costs, as well as force educators to seek parents’ consent before changing a child’s gender status in school documents.
However, the legislation – championed by House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) – is unlikely to make it to the Democrat-controlled Senate floor after passing in the House without any votes from the left.
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Once again, Congress decides to take it's control over legislation and pass to the president, who turns The Restrict Act, over to some unelected bureaucrat in The Commerce Department.
Instead of outlawing the Tik Tok bill, which would ban China from spying on our citizens, Congress is now allowing Commerce to have authority over our bank accounts w/o due process and more. The legislation creep is outrageous and is why the three branches of our governmental authority is out of whack.
No legislator who votes for this bill should be in Congress. They have abdicated once again their authority.
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Judaism's Stance on Gender Is Clear, Despite Attempts To Rewrite Torah
By Rabbi Yaakov Menken
, Managing Director, Coalition for Jewish Values
In 2020, various Jewish progressives organized a tendentious campaign of statements, articles, and even rallies insisting that Judaism permits—indeed, demands—unfettered abortion. I observed then that "few things have been said about Judaism by its purported adherents that are more clearly untrue." Now, following a new wave of opinion pieces and even news articles over the past few months, it seems necessary to add another item to the list: the notion that Judaism recognizes a range—perhaps even a "multiplicity"—of genders.
These claims popped up almost overnight, like mushrooms on a damp field after too much rain. Left-wing clergy, parents of prepubescent children, and even a sitting member of Congress all tried to obscure the obvious and promote the preposterous.
The idea of a "gender identity" distinct from biological sex is, of course, entirely modern. But there is an even more obvious reason why "gender identity" cannot be found in Torah or millennia of Rabbinic literature. Or, it should be obvious, at least, to anyone able to read even the first chapter of the Jewish Bible, in any of the over 700 languages into which it has been translated.
Genesis 1:27 declares (in English translation): "Male and female He Created them." The following chapter explains that male and female were Created together, and then separated so that husband and wife might rejoin, once again becoming "one flesh" through the forming of their offspring. And that is the sum total of what the Bible has to say about "gender identity:" that men and women are distinct Creations, complementary to each other, each made the way G-d wanted them to be.
What the rabbis still needed to address, of course, were birth defects and other physical aberrations, to understand how affected individuals should observe Jewish laws that differ for men and women. Since the four such phenomena described in the Talmud are mischaracterized by those who now promote modern notions of gender identity, it is worth briefly describing each of them in turn.
A saris is a eunuch, or one who has been castrated. This is the only one of the four examples discussed in the Talmud that could result from either acts of man or acts of nature. For a Jew to do this, however, even to an animal, violates, according to a commonly used 13th-century compilation, Commandment number 291 of the 613 Commandments found in the Torah.
The other three phenomena are all exclusively accidents of birth. An aylonis is a woman who is unable to develop physically, whether due to lacking a womb or a hormonal imbalance. An androgynous exhibits both male and female biological characteristics, and a tumtum, by contrast, has a membrane of skin covering the pubic region, such that his or her sexuality cannot always be determined.
The Talmud records a case of a tumtum who cut the membrane open, and went on to father seven children. Far from being some sort of early transgender procedure, this story proves that a tumtum is indeed of one or the other innate biological sex—it is just that it is masked.
Advocates often latch on to one singular phrase, "Rabbi Yossi says, an androgynous is a Creation of its own" [Bikkurim 4:5], yet, amazingly, do not finish the sentence: "and the rabbis could not prove conclusively if he is man or woman." In other words, this discussion of a minority opinion makes clear that the determination is an objective one, to be made by neutral judges. The individual's subjective self-perception is irrelevant; the only question is how he or she was Created by G-d.
This is the sole context of all such Talmudic discussions, which the advocates deliberately ignore. Not only is there no recognition of "gender identity" in Rabbinic literature, but aberrations are neither desirable nor a human choice; rather, they are unfortunate physical defects which legal decisors must address.
As stated at the outset, Judaism teaches that G-d Created male and female so that they might partner with Him in creating a next generation. Surgical and pharmaceutical interventions do not render a woman able to produce sperm or a man able to conceive, gestate, and deliver a baby.
No one can claim with a straight face that procedures resulting in permanent infertility, ongoing medical needs, and shortened lifespans are sanctioned under the moral beliefs of Judaism. All they do is deprive a person of healthy biological function while giving him/her a superficial resemblance to the other gender. Far better for a person to come to embrace what Divine Wisdom has bestowed upon each and every one of us.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken is managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values.
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Even Democrats Are Rejecting Biden Nominees
By Rick Moran
Democrats have a 51-seat majority in the Senate, but that doesn’t mean that Joe Biden’s nominees for federal office and the federal bench are getting an automatic stamp of approval. In fact, there have been several recent high-profile embarrassing withdrawals by nominees for a variety of reasons.
Some have been too radical — even for Democrats. Some have been woefully unqualified. But the curious thing about these withdrawals is that Senate Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer and the White House are blaming Republicans for the nomination’s failures.
Most recently, the nominee to fill the vacant FAA administrator position, Phil Washington, was forced to withdraw after some Democrats pointed out that Washington, a former military officer and CEO of the Denver International Airport, needed a waiver from the Defense Department to serve as FAA administrator. Washington claimed he didn’t despite what the law clearly says.
In addition to the waiver problem, Washington — embarrassingly — had no aviation experience. Sen. Krysten Sinema (I-Ariz.) alluded to this deficit in Washington’s resume in a statement, saying that “the administration should quickly nominate a permanent FAA administrator with the necessary, substantial aviation safety experience and expertise.”
The Commerce Committee has been a particular sore spot for Biden.
Politico:
The Commerce Committee in particular has given Biden’s nominees a rough ride. FCC nominee Gigi Sohn withdrew earlier this month after being twice nominated by Biden for a position on the commission. That’s on top of several other tough confirmation fights consuming the early days of this Congress.
Julie Su’s nomination to head the Labor Department is expected to draw most of the GOP’s attention in the coming weeks; she had no Republican support in the vote to confirm her as deputy Labor Secretary in 2021, and moderate Democrats will face pressure to oppose her even though she won Democratic support back then.
Before barely being confirmed as undersecretary of labor, Julie Su had served as California’s labor secretary during the time that more than $32 billion in COVID-19 unemployment fraud occurred. This may prove to be a bridge too far for many Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, who only said, “I’m looking forward to the hearing and looking forward to her confirmation.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Sohn was a partisan hack, tweeting out insults and invective against Republicans. Good riddance to her. And not all of Biden’s nominees for the federal bench are receiving universal approval.
In addition, judicial nominee Michael Delaney, is in limbo on the Judiciary Committee due to absences, but his nomination also may not have the votes to proceed anyway on Biden’s pick for the First Circuit Court of Appeal. Broadly speaking, Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said that given Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) absence, “I can’t consider nominees … A tie vote is a losing vote on the committee.”
On top of that, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has instituted a blockade of quick confirmation and promotion of Pentagon nominees after the Defense Department moved ahead with policies that would ease access to abortion and other reproductive care for troops.
The significance of Biden’s inability to get the people he wants in office or on the bench is that it shows just how weak he truly is. Biden’s being unable to get confirmations for second-tier nominees could come back to haunt him.
Rick Moran has been writing for PJ Media for 13 years. His work has appeared in dozens of media outlets including the Washington Times and ABC News. He was an editor at American Thinker for 14 years. His own blog is Right Wing Nut House. For media inquiries, please contact communications@pjmedia.com.
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https://nypost.com/2023/03/28/
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Today, Jewish identity is under attack through universities. We are being denied embracing our rich heritage and identification. Jewishness is being attacked at the University level and the purpose of all this anti-semitism is meant to make Universities fail on three levels:
a) Campus anti-semitism demands universities must find out who is responsible and pursue discipline
b) Universities, have a legal obligation to support victims
c) Why? Because those attacked must be protected so a single community remains welcome and can practice their God given freedom. Jews must not be forced, by universities, to disallow their connection to embrace Zionism. Zionism is not a viewpoint. Anti-semitism has morphed into any topic and seeks to pen it on Jews in order, by implication, to deny Jews their place in society, throw them out , prevent them from total participation by denigrating them.
Universities do not understand this is not engaging in politics and is not a political issue.
The Obama Administration erased the Ira Definition, through The State Department in 2010, by three definitions (examples.) Eventually, this battle crossed over into anti-semitism and gave those seeking to deny Jews their identity, even their right to have a nation . Jews are the only group that is subject to such exclusionary accusations for the purpose of erasing Jewish history, participation, practice.
The anti-semitic goal is to rid the world of Jews. Our existence is a valid right. University systems must embrace rhetoric that supports Jews who embrace Zionism. When Jews are attacked those who attack them must be identified as having engaged in an anti-semitic action. Jews must not be marginalized even if they define their identity as a Zionist or not.
Once this poison is allowed it will spread as a virus and eventually it will infect the entire society and that is the ultimate goal of the anti-semites.
Today Jews are now even being identified as racist whites etc.
As for Jews we have an obligation to stand up and respond and not be meek so that we are seen as in support of all groups etc.. This is why I am posting these views and op ed By Tunku Varadarian.
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DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America
By Tunku Varadarajan
Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.
You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”
Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”
A prime example was in the news as we spoke. Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to speak on campus. Confronted by a vicious leftist student mob, he asked administrators to intervene. Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for DEI, arose to deliver prepared remarks, which concluded: “I look out and I don’t ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ I look out and I say, ‘I’m glad this is going on here.’
Mr. Shapiro experienced a different kind of DEI humiliation in January 2022. He was concluding his tenure as a vice president of the Cato Institute and due to start a new job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school. Then Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would retire. Mr. Shapiro tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the “objectively best pick” for the vacancy but President Biden had already disqualified him on the basis of race and sex. Mr. Shapiro opined that Judge Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into the intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”
The tweet, which Mr. Shapiro describes as “inartfully phrased,” prompted an inquisition at Georgetown. The university suspended him with pay while its Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action conducted a four-month investigation into his fitness for the job. In June the office issued a report exonerating him—but on a technicality with an unsubtle chilling effect.
Since Mr. Shapiro wasn’t yet on Georgetown’s payroll, the report found, the university lacked jurisdiction over his speech. But if he “were to make another, similar or more serious remark as a Georgetown employee, a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex likely would be created.” In fact, Mr. Shapiro wrote in these pages, “it is the Georgetown administrators who have created a hostile work environment for me.” He quit and returned to the think-tank world.
If Mr. Shapiro were an English professor, one might put this down as a workplace dispute of marginal importance. But he has a point when he says law schools are different. They train “future lawyers and politicians and judges, and the gatekeepers to our institutions, to the rules of the game.” That game has the highest of stakes: “the rule of law, upon which American prosperity and liberty and equality sit.”
An illiberal takeover of medical schools, Mr. Shapiro quips, might be more “immediately dangerous, in the sense that you don’t have the best doctors treating people.” But some of the students who raged against Judge Duncan “are people who, in 20 years, are going to be joining the federal bench.” Sooner than that, “they’ll be occupying influential positions in state and federal government, bringing legal cases, becoming state legislators in some cases, or occupying the general counsel’s offices of Fortune 500 companies and the partnership ranks of big firms.”
Already, Mr. Shapiro says, partners at law firms “cower in fear of their associates, who question their firm’s representation of certain types of client and demand that statements be made by law firms after Supreme Court decisions and other developments in the political world.” A friend of his was a partner in the Houston office of a large global law firm. “She’s pro-life,” he says, declining to name the lawyer or the firm. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, various firm leaders asked her to handle some pro bono clients advancing pro-choice arguments. “She said she was too busy and didn’t make a stink over it,” Mr. Shapiro says. “Eventually, the managing partner of the Houston office said, ‘Well, I guess you’re pro-life. What’s the point of having a female partner who’s pro-life?’ ” She now practices independently.
Similar cases have been recounted in these pages. Former Solicitor General Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, then partners at Kirkland & Ellis, won a landmark Second Amendment victory last year at the Supreme Court. The firm responded by ordering them to drop the clients or resign; they walked. Hogan Lovell fired Robin Keller for saying that she agreed with the justices’ decision overturning Roe during an online conference call advertised as a “safe space” for female employees.
Much of this seems self-defeating. Would you hire an attorney who is made to feel “unsafe” by a Supreme Court decision? Wouldn’t a lawyer who heckled a judge in court go to jail for contempt? Maybe there’s still something to the idea that woke students are in for a shock after graduation.
“Professors are shying away from entire topics, not just a given perspective on a topic,” Mr. Shapiro says. They’re “just skipping over anything to do with rape or hate crimes, because they’re too sensitive. You try to write an exam question and there are too many red flags, too many tripwires.” These professors do “their students a disservice by not training them in how to advocate in the real world of courts. There, it’s not a conversation between the left and the far left.”
Mr. Shapiro says “nonprogressive” law professors were rare even 20 years ago, when he studied law at the University of Chicago. Critical legal studies, fashionable in the late 1980s and early ’90s, was “passé, a very small niche thing.” Since then, “what’s really changed is the bureaucratic explosion. And most of that bureaucracy is in this DEI space, which actively subverts the traditional educational mission of truth-seeking” with its “ideas of power dynamics and intersectionality, dividing people into oppressive and oppressed classes, and things like that.”
Pressure comes from without as well: In February 2022 the American Bar Association, which has sole authority to accredit U.S. law schools, passed a resolution demanding that they “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” At the same time, the Biden administration’s drive for racial equity “seems to be sprinkling political commissars throughout the government.” With a mordant optimism, he observes that those may be “the only kinds of jobs that law school graduates who refuse to engage ideas they don’t like and spew epithets at federal judges may be qualified for.”
But those jobs also have real-world power, the exercise of which could eventually cumulate into “regime change,” Mr. Shapiro warns. “I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or bombastic. If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates.”
These ideas are particularly fashionable on elite campuses, although Mr. Shapiro notes recent hostile incidents at lower-rated schools such as Texas A&M, the University of Kansas and UC Hastings (the last involving Mr. Shapiro himself). “There’s a higher quotient of activist types who would engage in disruptions and contribute to an illiberal atmosphere at a Yale than at a University of Iowa.” At top schools, “more people are getting that law degree to change the world, whereas at lower-ranked schools, they want to be lawyers. They want to make money and get a job and join the upper middle class.”
Is there any hope for elite schools? After Judge Duncan’s mobbing, Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford Law School, issued a 10-page memo that strongly defended free speech and academic freedom, apologized to the judge and announced that Ms. Steinbach, the DEI associate dean, had been placed on administrative leave.
Mr. Shapiro would like to see more. He thinks universities need to enforce their policies against hecklers’ vetoes by disciplining those who violate them. Law schools can suspend students, even expel them in serious cases, and impose career consequences. “They can also report to a bar association,” Mr. Shapiro says. “All law schools have to sign off on a character and fitness assessment before a graduate can take the bar exam.” If a student has been “completely disruptive, and has demonstrated that he doesn’t have the character and fitness to be a lawyer, they can be adjudged not fit to sit for the bar exam”—with due process, including the right of appeal, of course.
Ms. Martinez did none of that. Her memo promised to institute “mandatory educational programming for our student body rather than referring specific students for disciplinary sanction” and to blur students’ faces when the university releases video of the event.
Mr. Shapiro says there have to be “exogenous shocks to really change things.” One approach might be to target the elite schools’ status. Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch of the Fifth and 11th Circuits, respectively, announced in October that they won’t hire clerks from Yale until the school reforms its policies on free speech. “If any Supreme Court justice said that,” Mr. Shapiro says, “it would be a game-changer.” In an article for National Review, Judges Ho and Branch also called on Stanford to “identify the disrupters so that future employers know who they are hiring.”
Mr. Shapiro takes heart that “people who are not cultural warriors of the left or the right are starting to notice this stuff, and they don’t like what they see.” Lawmakers in 15 states have introduced bills to slash or abolish DEI offices and staff at public colleges, although none have passed so far. The backlash is still inchoate, and Mr. Shapiro believes the only solution is to purge “DEI bureaucracies that undermine the liberal values of academic speech and due process.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
Stanford University has taken down its ‘Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative’ site, following.
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